critical_angle

metpy.calc.critical_angle(pressure, u, v, heights, stormu, stormv)

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.

Parameters:

• pressure (pint.Quantity) – Pressures from sounding.
• u (pint.Quantity) – U-component of sounding winds.
• v (pint.Quantity) – V-component of sounding winds.
• heights (pint.Quantity) – Heights from sounding.
• stormu (pint.Quantity) – U-component of storm motion.
• stormv (pint.Quantity) – V-component of storm motion.

Returns:

pint.Quantity – critical angle in degrees