Stability Assessment » SWEAT Index Strengths and Limitations
The SWEAT index is advantageous for diagnosing severe convective potential since it takes into account many important parameters including low-level moisture, instability, and vertical wind shear (both speed and direction). However, a limitation is that inputs are only from 850 and 500 hPa levels, obscuring any inversions, dry layers, etc. that may be present in intervening layers. Also, it can be cumbersome to compute without an automated sounding routine such as the Interactive Skew-T.