A general method for the linear stability analysis of stratified shear flows

A general method for testing the stability of a stratified, parallel shear flow is presented. The technique allows the routine determination of unstable modes from any high resolution radiosonde data and is a development of the procedure described by Lalas and Einaudi. Stability analyses of several idealized velocity profiles have been performed in order to validate the method. A particularly important feature is the ability to predict marginally unstable modes with more than one critical level; several examples are presented. An example using real radiosonde data is given.