Singapore Airlines made international news earlier this month when Severe turbulence left one person dead and more than 30 people were injured. Then, just a few days later, one Flight attendant broke her back in serious chaos on a Turkish Airlines flight.
Some other serious turbulence incidents in the news this week suggests that perhaps the chaos has actually gotten worse. Again, we are also living in a time where The aviation industry is under much tighter scrutiny, so it’s also possible that we’re just hearing about it more because people have been paying attention to it. However, a review of recent research shows that this is not the case.
For example, there is a 2023 paper by University of Reading researcher Mark C. Prosser studied trends in clear air turbulence, a type of turbulence that occurs without clouds or thunderstorms, and the results don’t paint a pretty picture. While mild or greater CAT increased by only 17% over the North Atlantic from 1979 to 2020, moderate or greater CAT increased by 37% and severe or greater CAT increased by as much as 55%. So it’s not just chaos that’s happening more often. We are also seeing more serious chaos.
There is also a 2017 article from Dr. Paul D. Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in England, who was also a co-author of the previous study. The paper used computer modeling to estimate how much worse the chaos would be if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled. According to the study, we can expect mild, moderate and severe turbulence to increase by 59, 94 and 149% respectively. So expect the abject chaos to only get worse in the future. Those findings were also supported by another 2023 paper written by Dr. Soo-Hyun Kim of Seoul National Universityfound that we can expect climate change to make all types of turbulence worse, not just airborne turbulence.
In a phone interview with Jalopnik, Dr. John A. Knox, an aviation turbulence researcher at the University of Georgia, added more context:
So there are definitely anecdotal situations that are driven by high-profile events. And once you have one of those, the media is more likely to jump on the next one. Because then, if there’s another and another, then the audience will be ready for that. It seems like a growing trend. But there’s also research that’s been done that I think shows quite convincingly that we’re seeing more clear air disturbances, especially in the North Atlantic and the Northern Hemisphere. So it’s some of both.
Knox also pointed out that in the case of the Singapore Airlines flight, it was likely flying during a thunderstorm, so it experienced a different and more severe type of turbulence than most flights encounter. As he put it, “Clear air turbulence is turbulence at altitudes away from thunderstorms and is often but not always associated with the jet stream. So if you fly through a thunderstorm, it’s a little different.”
Of course, that raises questions about how exactly climate change makes the chaos worse. According to Knox, part of the reason may be warmer water and higher humidity in the air. “We are adding fuel to the fire for more thunderstorms,” he said. It also creates a stronger temperature gradient in the upper troposphere, the part of the atmosphere below the stratosphere where airplanes fly. Knox added:
Warmer ocean water and warmer surface temperatures lead to warmer air with more water vapor in it, and that’s what creates thunderstorms. So it makes sense that in the future the storms we experience will be stronger than they are now, and it has been proven that we are having shorter, heavier rains than before in areas of the United States. So if that has happened, it seems like a shot in the arm for the future. And so if you’re flying around stronger thunderstorms or trying to fly above them, you’re likely to encounter more convection-related turbulence. Obviously it could be anywhere, but it’s probably more dominant at lower latitudes because, frankly, we don’t have much of a jet stream at low latitudes.
However, it’s not just more, stronger thunderstorms:
This is important for wind because at mid-latitudes, that temperature gradient really drives the wind. It’s a famous relationship in meteorology called the thermal wind law. So ‘heat’ means temperature and wind means wind. And if you have a strong temperature gradient, from warm to cold, from low latitudes to higher latitudes, that means in the middle, in the middle latitudes, the winds are stronger and blow from west to east. As this temperature gradient increases at cruising altitude, what will happen is that the wind will become stronger. This will lead to more of what we call vertical wind shear or vertical wind shear, which is the change in horizontal wind as you go up in altitude. And that leads to chaos.
So we have an increased temperature gradient in the mid to upper troposphere leading to faster jets and we’re already seeing that. There have been reports of aircraft finding speeds faster than, not exactly, but faster than the speed of sound relative to the ground thanks to the incredible jet stream. So faster winds mean more wind shear, which means, at a scale that we can’t solve with computer models, there are a few more problems – gravity waves and instability determined. These are small-scale waves and instabilities that eventually, at the scale of a plane, cause bumpiness. Just like a wave breaks on the beach and you see all the foam due to the air in the water, there are waves and turbulence occurring in the atmosphere that lead to the same situation, only you don’t see it. foam if not cloudy. And so you are flying through a chaotic area without even realizing it. And that’s why you have chaos in the air.
While it might be an exaggeration to call Knox a doomsayer, when discussing the future of air travel, he doesn’t sound optimistic. And yet, he also says we don’t have to accept a future where serious injuries and deaths are a common occurrence. After all, airplanes already have a technology that has been proven to prevent most injuries from extreme turbulence — seat belts.
I think globally, we’re going to see more turbulence because most likely, from the perspective of what’s called convective turbulence or convection-induced turbulence – the fancy name for thunderstorms – and at the same time , in mid-latitudes due to changes in the jet stream. So wherever you are, I think it’s probably going to be more. Now will this lead to more injuries and deaths? I hope not because there is a really simple way to avoid this, which is to sit with your seat belt on as they say. Serious injuries happen when people don’t wear seat belts, or the crew is doing something and they don’t wear seat belts, or passengers ignore seat belt signs and don’t understand why you’re not wearing them. Fasten your seat belt mid-flight. flight. Well, here’s why.
So I don’t think we should have more injuries and certainly not more deaths than is obvious. We just need to get people to realize that they’re not kidding when they say wear your seat belt. You can drive through a lot of places with a good seat belt, but if you’re not wearing a seat belt and you briefly experience G-forces of one or more Gs, you’ll hit your head and break your neck. . If you keep this up, you can die.
It’s not exactly great news, but at least now you know you’re not imagining things. The turbulence experienced by the Singapore Airlines flight may have been a different, less common type of turbulence than what you’d normally encounter on a plane, but the turbulence across the board was worse than in previous decades , is caused by human-caused climate change, and it is expected to only get worse. Also, wear your damn seatbelts, people. It’s not that difficult, and even if it’s a bit inconvenient, it’s a lot more convenient than having to learn how to get around because some unexpected turbulence sends you crashing straight into an overhead compartment.
