No passenger likes to experience this, but frequent flyers will have to get used to increasingly bumpy air travel, as clear-sky turbulence has increased significantly over the past four decades.
Scientists were already warning that the warming caused by climate change would cause alterations to the air currents in the upper atmosphere, known as jet streams, which would translate into more turbulence in flights. Now, an analysis of climate data from 1979 to 2020 by British meteorologists has found that the predictions have come true and that the impact of global warming on clear-sky turbulence is even greater than that predicted the theoretical models.
According to the study by Mark Prosser, from the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, and his colleagues, the total annual duration of severe turbulence in the North Atlantic (a region crossed by some of the flight paths busiest in the world) has gone from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020, an increase of 55%. And moderate turbulence grew by 37% and went from 70 to 96.1 hours per year in the same period.
Mild turbulence only shakes the aircraft, but stronger episodes can cause some kind of injury or impact injury to the passenger and cause structural damage to aircraft. In fact, the repairs of the damage they cause to the planes cost the airlines more than a hundred million a year.
Turbulence in clear skies is caused by chaotic eddies of air, by “potholes” invisible to the naked eye due to the collision of air pockets that move at different speeds.
According to experts, the fact that they are now forming more, more frequently and more severely, has to do with changes in the jet stream caused by global warming. Warmer air drives stronger winds and vertical or horizontal changes in wind speed or direction, or both, leading to increased turbulence.
And, according to Prosser’s study, while the main increases have been in the North Atlantic and the United States, there are also significant increases on routes that cross Europe, the Middle East and the Atlantic south In all cases, the increase is above what climate models predict for the current level of global warming.
In 2013, British scientists published a study in Nature Climate Change that found that the odds of encountering turbulence in the North Atlantic air routes would increase by 40% to 170% by 2050, and the power of turbulence would also grow. between 10% and 40%. And the lower band of these forecasts had already been exceeded in 2020.
With 2022 the fifth hottest year on record and the planet now in a string of eight years with global warming of more than 1°C, Prosser and his team predict that turbulence will continue to worsen as change the climate
And this, in addition to making the passengers and crew of the planes have some bad times and forcing them to spend more time tied to their seats during the flight, will translate into more wear and tear on the planes and longer and more expensive flights , because pilots will have to modify routes to avoid areas of turbulence, which will lead to more fuel consumption.
