metpy.calc.
critical_angle
Calculate the critical angle.
The critical angle is the angle between the 10m storm-relative inflow vector and the 10m-500m shear vector. A critical angle near 90 degrees indicates that a storm in this environment on the indicated storm motion vector is likely ingesting purely streamwise vorticity into its updraft, and [Esterheld2008] showed that significantly tornadic supercells tend to occur in environments with critical angles near 90 degrees.
pressure (pint.Quantity) – Pressures from sounding
pint.Quantity
u (pint.Quantity) – U-component of sounding winds
v (pint.Quantity) – V-component of sounding winds
height (pint.Quantity) – Heights from sounding
u_storm (pint.Quantity) – U-component of storm motion
v_storm (pint.Quantity) – V-component of storm motion
pint.Quantity – Critical angle in degrees
Notes
Only functions on 1D profiles (not higher-dimension vertical cross sections or grids). Since this function returns scalar values when given a profile, this will return Pint Quantities even when given xarray DataArray profiles.
Changed in version 1.0: Renamed heights parameter to height
heights
height