For a person who absolutely loves traveling all over the world and have had the luck and privilege to do so for work and pleasure, flying is inevitable. Nevertheless, despite my many air travels, flying remains a daunting task for me. In all honesty, I am not a fan of riding any moving vehicle driven by anyone that is not me—an unfortunate remnant of a deadly bus accident during my teenage years.
The reality is, according to CNN Business, “flying is safer than most forms of travel and far, far safer than car rides most people take every day without thinking twice”. Still, turbulence is not fun, and it seems that climate change is making it worse.
First Things First: What Is Turbulence?
Turbulence is an irregular motion of the air caused by eddies and vertical currents. It is associated with weather events and can cause a few uncomfortable bumps or throw an aircraft out of control, inducing “chaotic rolls, pitches, and yaws”. There are three kinds of turbulence that affect aircrafts:
- Near-cloud or convectively induced turbulence comes from flying near or through a storm; thunderstorms are the main source of turbulence in tropical regions.
- Mountain wave turbulence is encountered flying over mountain ranges; scientists say these turbulent eddies usually occur downwind from mountain ridges.
- Clear air turbulence occurs in the upper-level airspace as a result of something called wind shear. That is where an aircraft is displaced from its flight path by rapid changes in wind speed or direction at different altitudes.
According to BBC, “turbulence is one of the most unpredictable of weather phenomena and research shows that severe turbulence is becoming more likely as the planet warms”.
How Is Climate Change Aggravating Turbulence?
In May of this year, following turbulence on a flight that led to one death and dozens of injuries, researchers are warning about links between warmer air and turbulence. In the atmosphere, warmer air can hold more water vapor, giving rise to even warmer temperatures in turn. This can create differences in air temperature, researchers write, making wind shear more common.
Findings suggest that turbulence strong enough to pose a risk of injury could become two or three times more likely over the North Atlantic between 2050 and 2080. “It is not that we will have to stop flying or planes will start falling out of the sky,” Paul Williams, atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading who has researched air turbulence, tells Nature News. “I am just saying that, for every ten minutes you have spent in severe turbulence in the past, it could be 20 or 30 minutes in the future.”
Birds to the Rescue?
Previous studies have shown that animal movements can help us determine the strength of thermal updrafts, wind direction, and wind speed. Now, researchers from Swansea University say birds’ experience of the winds could help provide predictions of turbulence.
Birds often migrate for great distances, with wind speed, direction, and turbulence dictating the route they travel and the amount of energy they need to expend. The Swansea University research suggests the possibility of using bird-borne sensors to shed light on air turbulence, much like the seal-borne sensors used to measure salinity and sea temperature.
“People are already equipping animals with tags for lots of different reasons and in lots of different environments,” says Emily Shepard, an expert in bird flight and air flow at Swansea University in Wales. “They are effectively sampling in the environment all the time.”
Technologies for detecting turbulence are getting better; pilots are currently able to use turbulence forecasts, which indicate the smoothest routes to take. Turbulence caused by stormy weather is often identified by weather centers, satellites, and on-ground sensors and radars. Clear-air turbulence, however, is still difficult to reliably predict. That said, developments in “light detection and ranging” (lidar) technologies, though still expensive and too cumbersome to put into practice, have shown promise.
Sources & References
www.washingtonpost.com
www.smithsonianmag.com
Cover Image by freepik