Clear-Air Turbulence Increases by 55% in Four Decades
Climate change is causing the skies to get bumpier,
with the North Atlantic experiencing the largest increases
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| Image by ThePixelman, Pixabay |
A new study has found that clear-air turbulence, which can make flights bumpy and occasionally dangerous, has increased by 55% from 1979 to 2020 over the North Atlantic, one of the world's busiest flight routes. The increase is consistent with warmer air temperatures caused by climate change. The news is first released by AGU.
Clear-air turbulence, or CAT for short, is a type of turbulence that occurs in clear skies and is not associated with a storm. It can be particularly hazardous because it’s essentially invisible to remote sensing tools used for aviation and challenging to predict. It is created by small-scale eddies that are too localized for most weather models to explicitly calculate. This information is derived from the current web page context.
Mark Prosser, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who led the study, warns that airlines will need to start thinking about how they will manage the increased turbulence, as it costs the industry $150 to $500 million annually in the United States alone.
Clear-air turbulence can be particularly hazardous because it’s essentially invisible to remote sensing tools used for aviation and challenging to predict. Scientists have evidence that clear-air turbulence will be more frequent in the future because of climate change.
The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed 40 years of high-quality atmospheric data and calculated clear-air turbulence in 21 different ways over the past 40 years for the first time. The researchers found that other busy flight routes over the United States, Europe, the Middle East and the South Atlantic also saw significant increases in turbulence.
Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading who co-authored the study, suggests investing in improved turbulence forecasting and detection systems to prevent rougher air from translating into bumpier flights in the coming decades.
