If you are a frequent air traveler and think that the turbulence in the air is increasing, you are not wrong. Turbulence numbers have increased drastically over the past few decades.
A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says turbulence has not only increased in the recent past, reported cases of severe turbulence have increased by more than 50 percent in 40 years. And it lays out the culprit: Warmer air due to climate change.
Meteorologists at the University of Reading in England analyzed air temperature data as well as turbulence occurring without a visual cue, which they term “open air turbulence” in the study. Unlike turbulence caused by a nearby storm or heavy cloud coverage, this type of turbulence is not easy to detect in advance. If flight crews can’t see a potential sign of turbulence, they can’t avoid it. The study authors reported that the incidence of severe turbulence over the North Atlantic, one of the world’s busiest flight routes, increased from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020. This represents an increase of 55% in forty years.
During the same time period, the medium turbulence time increased from 70 hours to 96.1 hours, indicating an increase of close to 37 percent. Light turbulence increased 17 percent from 466.5 hours to 546.8 hours. North America and the North Atlantic saw the highest increases in turbulence, but researchers also noted increases in other busy flight corridors, including Europe and the South Atlantic.
Heated air = more turbulence
The timeline of these turbulence increases coincides with the effects of climate change on the planet. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Earth’s temperature has increased by an average of 0.08 degrees Celsius every decade since the late 1800s. The warming rate has also increased significantly since the early 1980s, reaching 0.18 degrees Celsius. The study says warmer air increases wind shear in global jet streams. Wind shear is used to describe how the wind changes its direction and/or speed, according to NOAA. This means that the wind changes direction or speed and usually occurs at high altitudes where airplanes fly.
Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading and one of the study’s co-authors, was part of an earlier report examining how wind shear has increased by about 15 percent since 1979 in 2019. In a later study, Williams and his colleagues used climate model simulations to predict that clean air turbulence would continue to increase at different rates depending on greenhouse gas emissions.
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