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Frequent flyers know that the skies are not always smooth, and while turbulence fatalities are rare, the overall bumpiness in the air is becoming more frequent, and severe.

That violent mid-air event last week that showed a Singapore Airlines flight from London hit harsh, unexpected turbulence, injuring 83 passengers and resulting in one fatality, is a case in point.

This event was particularly severe, but atmospheric scientists are acknowledging that these situations are becoming more likely, and they blame it on our ever-warming atmosphere.

“We now have strong evidence that turbulence is increasing because of climate change,” Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in the UK, said over email to Mashable.

“We recently discovered that severe clear-air turbulence in the North Atlantic has increased by 55 percent since 1979.” (The 55 percent refers to increased total time of observed turbulence occurring.)

The researchers also noted that “similar increases are also found over the continental USA” – both the North Atlantic and the US see some of the busiest travel routes in the world – noting that general turbulence will likely grow worse, too.

“Our latest future projections indicate a doubling or trebling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades, if the climate continues to change as we expect,” Williams added.

The troubling thing is that these pockets of rockiness are hardly detectable.

The skies can be clear, blue, and tranquil. “And all of a sudden, boom, you hit it,” Dan Bubb, a former airline pilot and now an aviation historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Mashable.

The boom is “clear-air turbulence,” a well-known hazard to aircraft and the passengers aboard. It’s created by unstable air that commercial planes sometimes cruise through at higher altitudes and it is not visible from the cockpit and doesn’t show up on the flight deck’s weather radar.

“It’s almost like hitting a deep pothole with a car going 60 mph,” Bubb said.

The hope is always that the turbulence is going to jolt people, and not injure them.

The Thai hospital treating Singapore Airlines passengers says most of them have spinal injuries and six people sustained brain and skull injurieshttps://t.co/Af2ee0kQlR pic.twitter.com/JhR5piqPPk

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 23, 2024

Commercial airliners cruise at high altitudes, typically between 31,000 and 42,000 feet, where the air is thinner, allowing for more fuel-efficient flight. However, these altitudes also coincide with the powerful atmospheric jet streams.

Jet streams are fast-moving air currents that circle the Earth. They often meander like a lazy river but generally flow eastward at speeds of up to 275 mph. Our planet has four main jet streams: two in the polar regions and two in the lower latitudes. One of these often passes over the U.S. and the North Atlantic Ocean.

These potent jetstreams impact flight in all sorts of ways all the time, either pushing flights across the Atlantic, shortening travel times; or otherwise increasing flight times when a craft is flying in the opposite direction, against the wind.

Yet warmer air is now boosting the amount of wind shear — the difference in wind speeds at different heights — in the jet stream. Crucially, this is “strengthening clear-air turbulence in the North Atlantic and globally,” the University of Reading explained.

The jetstreams are disrupted from below, explained Michael Pravica, a physics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

There’s increasingly more heat in the climate system, particularly over bodies of water (most of the warming that human activity is trapping on Earth is soaked up the extremely absorbent oceans). Crucially, this added heat rises in a process called convection, similar to how boiling water propels rice around a pot. And this atmospheric convection can disrupt the rapidly flowing jet stream.

“When you have more energy, you have more convection,” Pravica explained. “And more convection means more turbulence.”

Naturally, when a plane speeds at some 550 mph through the skies and suddenly launches within disrupted air, the plane is going to react and passengers are going to be jostled silly, especially if they’re not belted.

Next time you’re on a trans-Atlantic flight and you experience sudden bad turbulence, remember that climate change is making such turbulence worse.

New ‘stripes’ showing the increase in moderate clear air turbulence in the Atlantic since 1979 using ERA5. pic.twitter.com/YdvhzxNqHM

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) August 17, 2023

Recent data from Turbli revealed that certain routes around the world are particularly prone to high turbulence levels. These routes exhibit significant turbulence due to a combination of landscape features, climatic conditions, and jet stream positions.

As Earth continues to heat up, scientists reckon severe turbulence, and clear-air turbulence, will definitely worsen this century.

To protect yourself from a serious bump on the head, it’s probably best to leave your seatbelt on even when the pilot turns the ‘fasten seat belt’ sign off.

We probably need to take this phenomenon more seriously.

[source:mashable]