Historical monthly records of tropical and midlatitude boundary-layer capping inversion strength and height from 1950 to 2023

The boundary-layer capping inversion is a singular point of the temperature varying with height, which is not resolved mathmatically but can be directly measured from observations. In physics, it is referred to as an entrainment interfacial layer (EIL), which determines the upper limit of boundary-layer turbulant mixing and the mixture between the cloud top and free-tropospheric air. It strongly constrains the vertical distribution of aerosols, moisture and clouds. Thus, the capping inversion is a critical representative metric to reveal how the Earth’s climate changes. However, the previous widely-used metrics of the capping inversion, the low-tropospheric stability (LTS) and estimated inversion strength (EIS), rely on the well-mixed assumption, which would lead to the misrepresentation of the inversion strength in the decoupled boundary layers. Technically, due to the limitation of the LTS and EIS in decoupled conditions, how the capping inversion changes with global temperature rising remains unresolved. A refined metric for the capping inversion strength (namely the profile-based estimated inversion strength, EISp) and a novel metric for its height (zinv) have been proposed in Wang et al., (2023, ACP - Profile-based estimated inversion strength) and are derived from the hourly ERA5 reanalysis. Notably, EISp and zinv do not rely on the well-mixed assumption and thereby can correctly represent the capping inversion in the decoupled boundary layers. Here, this dataset provides the historical records of monthly EISp and zinv of 0.5-degree spatial resolution between 60°S and 60°N from 1950 to 2023. This dataset is potentially important for understanding how the environmental temperature structure changes with global temperature rising.