Estimating climatological planetary boundary layer heights from radiosonde observations: Comparison of methods and uncertainty analysis

Planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes control energy, water, and pollutant exchanges between the surface and free atmosphere. However, there is no observation‐based global PBL climatology for evaluation of climate, weather, and air quality models or for characterizing PBL variability on large space and time scales. As groundwork for such a climatology, we compute PBL height by seven methods, using temperature, potential temperature, virtual potential temperature, relative humidity, specific humidity, and refractivity profiles from a 10 year, 505‐station radiosonde data set. Six methods are directly compared; they generally yield PBL height estimates that differ by several hundred meters. Relative humidity…