After the turbulence encounter by a Singapore Airlines aircraft, there has been a slew of articles claiming that severe turbulence incidents are rapidly increasing due to global warming. The articles below in the Seattle Times and on the BBC are just two of hundreds of such stories
Several stories have been quite specific stating that turbulence has increased 55% in 50 years, based on a study by investigators at the University of Reading.
Is any of this true? As I will describe below, there are substantial problems with these apocalyptic claims of radically more bumpy skies.
But before we discuss these turbulence claims, keep in mind that aircraft turbulence can be caused by several different mechanisms, and not all of them are related to changes in climate.
Much of the turbulence is due to convection associated with big cumulus clouds, like cumulonimbus, which produce thunderstorms. The turbulence on the Singapore Airlines flight was associated with tropical convection.
Other turbulence is associated with high-amplitude atmospheric waves associated with mountains (see figure). Such turbulence is often observed downstream of major mountain barriers such as the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada.
There is also turbulence associated with vertical wind shear: if wind speed changes rapidly with height, the atmosphere can break down into turbulence eddies. This kind of turbulence often occurs without clouds and thus is often called clear air turbulence and is generally the least severe of the major turbulence mechanisms. Finally, it is possible to get turbulence near the surface, called mechanical turbulence, as air passes around objects.
How frequent are the different sources of turbulence? The best records and observations are found in the United States and the contributions of various types of turbulence by month are shown below (from an FAA document) for 2009-2018.
Convective turbulence is number one and dominates in spring and summer. Clear air or shear turbulence is number two and is most dominant during the cool season.
Is turbulence increasing rapidly over time as suggested by the media headlines?
FAA records don’t seem to suggest this. Below is a graph showing the percentage of aircraft incidents/accidents caused by turbulence (dark line). No increasing trend since the late 1980s!
So where are all these dramatic claims for increasing turbulence with global warming coming from?
Answer: from a handful of papers from one group at the University of Reading. The key paper is here.
In this paper, they DON’T USE ANY TURBULENCE OBSERVATIONS. Rather, they use analysis of weather data on a grid (called a reanalysis) and use a theoretical model that they suggest should indicate shear-forced turbulence. But they really don’t have the data to back this up or to demonstrate their approach is reliable.
Even more problematic, the 55% increase in turbulence they cite is NOT for the entire world but just for one region in the North Atlantic. If you read the actual paper (I have), there are all kinds of qualifiers that never made it into media stories.
To gain some perspective, their 55% increase in this one location represents an increase from 17.7 to 27.4h PER YEAR. Ten hours more a year is 0.0011 of a year. For the least severe source of aircraft turbulence (vertical wind shear).
The media did not tell you that the increase was so minor. Still worried? And that paper said nothing about the other sources of strong turbulence, which in total are more important than the shear-induced, clear-air turbulence they considered.
And there are other technical problems with the above paper that could be a real problem. For example, the weather observational system has been greatly expanded and enhanced over the past 40 years, allowing observations to far better define atmospheric structures that can produce turbulence. Massive additions of satellite data and aircraft observations have occurred during the period in which the Reading group claimed the threat was increasing the most. Was the threat really increasing or was our ability to define strong wind shear layers getting better. They didn’t say.
In summary, I believe there are no reliable studies that indicate a substantial increase in aircraft turbulence due to changing climate conditions. The media is needlessly causing folks to worry about flying.
Any correlation in a storm to remove the peoples right to go…
Wherever they want (any destination)
Whenever they want (any time)
However they want (Planes, Trains and Automobiles…and Ships)
Who is the author of this useful piece?
The phantom blogger
Cliff Mass.
Many institutions and compagnies blame climate change for their own gross incompetence and/or blattant inability to fulfill their own missions, because of their woke agenda, the ESG idiocy, the IDE absurdity which actually contribute to make their activity unsustainable. This ideological meltdown is done at the expense of prosperity and security since it induces useless extra-costs on everything and it endangers the consumers (see for example the Boeing disaster).
Its climate turbulence ….and no doubt akin to climate storms…..and soon to be discovered climate disease.
From the article: “But before we discuss these turbulence claims, keep in mind that aircraft turbulence can be caused by several different mechanisms, and not all of them are related to changes in climate.”
And keep in mind that there is no evidence that the current climate on Earth is any different than it was 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, and there is certainly no evidence of a connection between CO2 and the Earth’s climate or any particular weather event that occurs within the climate.
The author is assuming a little too much here.
The usual warmunist bullshit promulgated by the dumb media outlets.
There is no mechanism by which anybody can demonstrate how very slight warming at very low altitudes (where relatively little human flight takes place, on a miles flown bases) over hundreds of years has any impact whatsoever on atmospheric turbulence. Turbulence is but one of many manifestations of the complex planetary system we have here on Earth involving heat redistribution, Coriolis effect, terrain effects, axial tilt (seasons), orbital variations, ocean currents, etc..
Not to mention, the fact that flying in the atmosphere is but one of the most recent of evolutions of human society, and it is widely recognized that flying involves certain hazards associated with weather, some of which are predictable and avoidable (like pressure fronts) and others are unpredictable (clear air turbulence, or CAT). Plus there is the fact that vastly more people are routinely flying today as compared to several decades ago – the more flights, the more people involved, the more common the reports of aircraft incidents of all kinds, despite continuing improvements in air safety. The media thrives and luxuriates in reports of aviation incidents.
The retired pilot that informed us recently on this matter said that our technology has made it easier to avoid storms but hasn’t reached the level where it can reliably chart turbulent air. I submit that the rerouting to avoid obvious turbulence found in storms has necked down travel paths through admittedly “unknown air”. Furthermore, we were told that its routine to request ATC for an altitude change once flying into turbulent air.
Propaganda requires saturating the space with a common narrative. That is why we are seeing all of this hyperventilating over turbulent air. Additionally, very stupid people write these articles, perhaps even generative AI is crafting some of them. I seriously doubt that there is any original thinking involved in any of these articles so its reflexive to fall back to mythology, folklore and camp fire tales to explain natural phenomena which mankind can’t absolutely control.
CAT is something that typically happens well displaced in both time and space from lines of thunderstorms that air traffic controllers and aircrew try to avoid flying through.
CAT usually results from vertical wind shear. Vertical wind shear is exacerbated in winter or the cool season because the westerly winds of the north polar jet stream get drawn southward from the polar region to the mid latitudes. Wind speeds at altitudes where commercial transports usually fly (in the 30 thousands) in the winter months can run well above 275 miles per hour! And as altitude is reduced, the windspeed drops dramatically. This along with tropospheric pressure fronts can produce extreme wind sheer at altitude. And it’s invisible, because it occurs up high “above the weather”.
AWG’s Rule when reading obvious propaganda:
Why am I reading this narrative, written this way at this time?
Its always an Op. Activists, rent-seekers, hedge-funds, regulatory capture, enemy action all have a vested interest in preparing the battle space. Propaganda has been perfected by Big Tech as we have seen with C19, CO2, Trump and Ukraine.
When knowledge is power, articles are not meant to inform, they are meant to have the reader come to the wrong conclusion.
Insightful comment, love the last sentence.
Models all the way down?
Maybe all of these new wind turbines could be causing the extra turbulence?
Otherwise, it’s just more desperation and scaremongering from the cult.
No. Next stupid question, please.
I would have thought a quick and dirty check would be to plot from 1940 till now, CO2, Temp, number of flights, number of routes and number of smart phones and spot any alleged correlations!
Oops, there’s that “re-analysis data” thingy again.
It is truly amazing how “Data” changes when you have groups of people who never gathered it in the first place publish their “limited understanding” after massaging it several times with computer programs years later.
“ one region in the North Atlantic”
I wonder if this one region, is experiencing an increase in air traffic, like from Europe to the US?
Turbulence experienced is partly a consequence of route selection and navigation by the pilots, hence it is a worthless climate measure.
Maybe pilots are under more pressure to save time/money and hence take more risks when avoiding certain weather phenomena? Maybe they are just worse pilots, from similar economic pressures?
The paper is about an increase in Clear Air Turbulence which is only about 10% of the total in the FAA graph, but most of the turbulent events at cruise altitudes (e.g. 37,000′) are CAT.
Wouldn’t “black boxes” record accelerations on the airframe during flight, and could be analysed after ?
Who needs real word data or even modeled data. My Senator, Debbie Stabenaw, claims she can feel the increased turbulence every time she flies. That is good enough for me./s
Just another example of the media being pressured by governments and environmental organization donors to make mountains out of molehills. How many of these predictions did we see before these recent turbulence incidents? I can’t recall any, but now that we’ve had a couple of them, they must be caused by what else but man-made climate change. When are the alarmists going to give the public a rest?