Have a look at this site
http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html
and the Skew-T diagrams. For Region, select Europe; for Type of Plot select GIF: Skew-T, and you get what amounts to a METAR map of data gathered from met baloons.
The generated diagram shows the profile of temperature and dew point versus height and this shows, among other things e.g. the freezing level, the temperature lapse rate.
Most of the time the lapse rate is nowhere near the book figure.