The conservative shape of temperature profiles in the lower troposphere above the Antarctic ice sheet makes the surface temperature, ts, an effective independent variable for estimating the height of the 500 hPa surface above automatic weather stations (AWS). In place of regression equations for the thinning of the surface/500 hPa layer (produced by negative layer mean temperatures, t) as a dependent variable, an alternative approach examined here uses the layer mean temperature itself as a dependent variable. It is shown that this eliminates systematic differences between the regression parameters for radiosonde stations at different elevations, and should validate a single set of parameters for a wide range of AWS sites.
Radok et al. (Fri,) studied this question.