critical_angle

metpy.calc.critical_angle(pressure, u, v, height, u_storm, v_storm)

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

• height (pint.Quantity) – Heights from sounding

• u_storm (pint.Quantity) – U-component of storm motion

• v_storm (pint.Quantity) – V-component of storm motion

Returns

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

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