Homogenized Variability of Radiosonde-Derived Atmospheric Boundary Layer Height over the Global Land Surface from 1973 to 2014

Abstract

oundary layer height (BLH) significantly impacts near-surface air quality, and its determination is important for climate change studies. Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive data from 1973 to 2014 were used to estimate the long-term variability of the BLH based on profiles of potential temperature, relative humidity, and atmospheric refractivity. However, this study found that there was an obvious inhomogeneity in the radiosonde-derived BLH time series because of the presence of discontinuities in the raw radiosonde dataset. The penalized maximal F test and quantile-matching adjustment were used to detect the changepoints and to adjust the raw BLH series. The most significant inhomogeneity of the BLH time series was found over the United States from 1986 to 1992, which was mainly due to progress made in sonde models and processing procedures. The homogenization did not obviously change the magnitude of the daytime convective BLH (CBLH) tendency, but it improved the statistical significance of its linear trend. The trend of nighttime stable BLH (SBLH) is more dependent on the homogenization because the magnitude of SBLH is small, and SBLH is sensitive to the observational biases. The global daytime CBLH increased by about 1.6% decade?1 before and after homogenization from 1973 to 2014, and the nighttime homogenized SBLH decreased by ?4.2% decade?1 compared to a decrease of ?7.1% decade?1 based on the raw series. Regionally, the daytime CBLH increased by 2.8%, 0.9%, 1.6%, and 2.7% decade?1 and the nighttime SBLH decreased significantly by ?2.7%, ?6.9%, ?7.7%, and ?3.5% decade?1 over Europe, the United States, Japan, and Australia, respectively.