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Geopotential Height

Geopotential Height

In practice, most measurements of the atmosphere are made of pressure not elevation due to the variation in gravity at different elevations and  latitudes. The pressure contours of the atmosphere are defined by a geopotential height (i.e. a “gravity-corrected elevation”). To understand this mathematically, consider the equation for hydrostatic equilibrium: We can replace by invoking the Ideal Gas Law which can rearranged as This is a solvable ordinary differential equation, which has the measured height as a function of pressure. Here, defines the…

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