2019/11/19 by Hing Ong, Paul E. Roundy · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Climate variability and models #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes #physics.ao-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/qj.3703
published as Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 146(727), 700-706 (2020) · 10 pages, 3 figures, This is the accepted version of an article that has been published in final form
openalex publication_date 2019/11/19 · arxiv created 2020/11/18 · arxiv updated 2020/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This study corrects the hypsometric equation by restoring the nontraditional terms to relax the hydrostatic approximation. The nontraditional terms include one Coriolis term and two metric terms in the vertical momentum equation. The hypsometric equations with and without the nontraditional correction are used to calculate the geopotential height of pressure levels using more than 300,000 selected tropical rawinsonde profiles. With westerlies between two pressure levels, the thickness of the layer increases, which reduces the upward pressure gradient forces to balance the upward nontraditional Coriolis forces; the opposite is true for easterlies. Hence, zonal winds are negatively correlated with traditional geopotential height biases aloft. At 500 hPa, for example, traditional geopotential height error in the tropical troposphere is on the order of at least 0.5 m, which is considerable with respect to geopotential height variability in tropical large-scale flow, on the order of 10 m to 15 m.