Converting pressure to height

[IreneCrisologo]

Hi, I am processing ERA5 data to look at the relationship of temperature and height over time. I only have the pressure level data, which I believe can be converted to height. Seems like in metpy, there could be two functions to do this:
metpy.calc.thickness_hydrostatic and metpy.calc.pressure_to_height_std

I was wondering about the metpy.calc.pressure_to_height_std function, why it doesn't take in temperature as a parameter? Can I use that for my purpose still?

And when using metpy.calc.thickness_hydrostatic, I get zeros and negative values that are 1/10 of the expected height (ex. -250m instead of 2500m). Was I doing it wrong? Below is a snippet of my code.

Any leads would help, thank you!

ureg = pint.UnitRegistry()

temp_col_tseries = []
level_at_zero = []
height_hydrostatic = []
for i in range(len(time)):
    temp_col = temp[i,:,10,15]
    
    level_ = level.data[np.where((temp_col.data<=(3.0+273.15))&(temp_col.data>=(1.0+273.15)))]
    temp_ = temp_col.data[np.where((temp_col.data<=(3.0+273.15))&(temp_col.data>=(1.0+273.15)))]
    
    if len(level_)==0:
        level_at_zero.append(np.nan)
        height_hydrostatic.append(np.nan)
    else:
        level_at_zero.append(np.nanmean(level_))
        height_hydro_ = mpcalc.thickness_hydrostatic(pressure=level_*ureg.millibars,temperature=temp_*ureg.kelvin)
        height_hydrostatic.append(height_hydro_)
        print(height_hydro_)
    temp_col_tseries.append(temp_col.data)

[dopplershift]

pressure_to_height_std assumes a U.S. Standard Atmosphere, which itself prescribes a particular vertical temperature profile--so unfortunately, you can't give it any temperature information. Whether you can use it depends on whether that assumption is good enough for your purposes.

thickness_hydrostatic calculates the thickness of a layer, given a profile (you can optionally give the function an entire profile and tell it the bottom layer and depth in pressure. I was able to make the function work with the following code:

import metpy.calc as mpcalc
from metpy.units import units
import numpy as np

press = np.array([1000., 500.]) * units.hPa
temp = np.array([0., -20.]) * units.degC
mpcalc.thickness_hydrostatic(press, temp)

that gives me a thickness of 5339.024514591471 meter which seems reasonable.

[IreneCrisologo]

Thank you, that was a lot of help!