What does "geopotential" mean?

The work that must be done at a given altitude in raising a unit mass from sea level to that altitude against the earth's gravitational field.

Geopotential

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
The work that must be done at a given altitude in raising a unit mass from sea level to that altitude against the earth's gravitational field.
"It might sound puzzling that the ageostrophic geopotential (or the ageostrophic pressure in z-coordinate) has no impact on the evolution of the vorticity of a quasi-geostrophic disturbance and yet it affects the perturbation kinetic energetics (not globally but locally)."

Example

More examples

"It might sound puzzling that the ageostrophic geopotential (or the ageostrophic pressure in z-coordinate) has no impact on the evolution of the vorticity of a quasi-geostrophic disturbance and yet it affects the perturbation kinetic energetics (not globally but locally)."

Etymology

From geo- + potential.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.