Evaluating the seasonal cycle of lower tropospheric stability over sea ice in observations and models

Lower tropospheric stability (LTS) is a bulk estimate of the stability structure of the near-surface atmosphere. It is variously defined in the literature. We analyze the seasonal cycle of LTS over sea ice in CESM1, CESM2, ERA5, and using AIRS and weather balloon observations. The goal is to identify biases and causes for biases in the representation of LTS in models.

Data

We access the CESM LENS and CESM-2 LE datasets from the Amazon Web Service using the python xarray library.

Setup

Necessary Python libraries:

• intake
• pandas
• numpy
• xarray
• proplot