Climate change is causing more frequent and severe turbulence even in clear skies, pushing the aviation industry to gear up for more complex and potentially more expensive flight operations to deal with a problem that so far has largely left Luxembourg aircraft unaffected.
In May, severe turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight connecting London to Singapore led to one passenger death and several injuries. The incident brought attention to how severe weather is hitting air travel and how it will worsen in the coming decades.
Aviation studies currently tend to focus on emissions reduction and preparing optimal flight routines and “less so on encountering turbulence,” University of Reading meteorologist and PhD researcher Isabel Smith told the Luxembourg Times.
Yet, clear air turbulence (CAT) is directly linked to global warming, and is one of the most likely types of turbulence to impact aviation, she said. CAT describes violent shaking that strikes aircraft despite clear skies as they travel across altitudes above 6,000 metres.
Clear air turbulence cannot be detected by on-board radars, and though 75-80% of occurrences can be forecast, it is not accompanied by visual cues like clouds and “can hit the aircraft quite suddenly”, Smith said.
Though the aircraft “is not at risk,” clear air turbulence can be dangerous for passengers as pilots and crew might not have sufficient time to ask passengers to fasten their seatbelt, Luxembourg passenger airline Luxair said in an email. The regional airline’s routes have less exposure to high-altitude conditions than transcontinental carriers.
The increase in CAT results from the growing temperature difference between the troposphere – the lowest level of the atmosphere where humans live – and the stratosphere, the layer just above it.
“The stratosphere has always been cooler than the troposphere, but because we’re trapping in the heat in the troposphere we’re cooling down the stratosphere. The resulting vertical temperature difference is accelerating jet streams across the globe,” Smith explained.
The new conditions could change the travel experience for passengers over time as airlines chart routes that “avoid CAT patches as much as possible,” Smith said.
“With this increase, it’s less likely that these Singapore Airlines-like events will happen. It’s more likely that you’ll have longer flights, more convoluted flight routes, more emissions and more expensive flights,” she said.
