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 soundingu (
pint.Quantity
) – U-component of sounding windsv (
pint.Quantity
) – V-component of sounding windsheight (
pint.Quantity
) – Heights from soundingu_storm (
pint.Quantity
) – U-component of storm motionv_storm (
pint.Quantity
) – V-component of storm motion
- Returns
pint.Quantity
– Critical angle in degrees
Examples
>>> from metpy.calc import critical_angle, wind_components >>> from metpy.units import units >>> p = [1000, 925, 850, 700, 500, 400] * units.hPa >>> h = [250, 700, 1500, 3100, 5720, 7120] * units.meters >>> wdir = [165, 180, 190, 210, 220, 250] * units.degree >>> sped = [5, 15, 20, 30, 50, 60] * units.knots >>> u, v = wind_components(sped, wdir) >>> critical_angle(p, u, v, h, 7 * units.knots, 7 * units.knots) <Quantity(67.0942521, 'degree')>
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 toheight