Geopotential Height

up:: 034 MOC Atmospheric Physics

Given a Geopotential , the geopotential height is defined as

where is the gravitational field at , the usual .

When , one has , differing from it when , i.e. at higher altitudes.

For a gravitational field

Opening as¹

we have the same results for the respective geopotential, just also dividing by :

When , naturally we have

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References

• WALLACE, John Michael; HOBBS, Peter Victor. Atmospheric science: an introductory survey. 2nd ed ed. Amsterdam Paris: Academic press, 2006.

Footnotes

1. Naturally supposing that the Earth is spherical, i.e. integrating over is equivalent to integrating radially. ↩