you may want to mention the Brunt Vaisala frequency. Is that vertical cross section of geopotential for the entire month or a single day ? And finally the source of that data.

Yes thanks. Also over lat,lon are you taking the cross section ? The lon is obvious but the lat is not. I get a different cross section - psl.noaa.gov/tmp/composites/compday.SW9m333PBk.gif

If I remember hazily right, Brunt Vaisala has some similarities to Rossby length, both looking at how far a feature has a scale significant impact on the atmosphere?? Just not sure it would aid in spillthrill's understanding or for the typical person that would come along without having had a heavy focus on atmospheric sciences or similar subjects. Touching on thermal wind\QG seemed far enough complexity that may lose people!

Afraid it's over my head these days (now 13 years removed from any research/coursework outside of forecasting topics and synoptic subjects), so if you think it's important, you'd have to write it up.

All right. Sorry about that.

My general goal on SE questions (unless the question posed really suggests advanced familiarity... in which case I often pass due to lack of that depth myself!) is to make it approachable to as many people as possible... it's something I think we need to do better in science\meteorology. Use enough technical terms, honestly the people asking the question\reading are just going to glaze over. It's a tough rope to walk, but trying to meet people where they are rather than overload with unnecessary things stops discouraging people from scientific approach.

The onus is on us to convince and teach, and SE isn't really a classroom where we can hold students to expectations of academic rigor/growth that we can if they are persuring the field!

Yes completely understand. Part of the reason why I stopped writing answers because I can now communicate with researchers better than students

Always a good thing to admit, and you answer questions I have no clue on! So we both have a part to add.

I spent hours trying to find a good vertical crosssection of a warm core high, before finally giving up and relearning GrADS. There goes the day. The plot is calculated using the June 2020 monthly mean geopotential at 35N, subtracting out the zonal mean geopotential from 35N. (So at any height, the figure should average to 0 horizontally) To try to prevent confusion over the meaning of the word anomaly (as usually that suggests the difference from temporal climo), I went with perturbation. Does that make sense/is there a better term I should be using?

I am not sure about average to 0 horizontally but the NCAR NOAA reanalysis page does vertical cross sections.. They include climatology so you can calculate the anomaly.

@JeopardyTempest If you need to remove zonal mean you need to use CDO. But you are looking for a non programmatic solution?

no idea what CDO is. I would've been plenty happy to find the old reanalysis plotter or a simple image... but as it was I stepped back into GrADS, which I'd been wanting to do, so no complaints in the end. Surprising what basic fundamental imagery\conceptual diagrams are hard to come by.

CDO Climate Data Operators

That's a programming language I take it?

No it's a software package. But you need Linux to install it

and then you can run command line operations on netCDF files

zonal mean, daily mean, monthly mean