Climate Change Will Increase Violent Turbulence On Airline Flights

Scientists believe climate change will cause much more violent turbulence of the sort that broke the leg of a Turkish Airlines flight attendant this weekend and sent 28 passengers to the hospital.
Severe turbulence is expected to increase by several hundred percent in the crowded airspace over North America, Europe and the North Pacific by mid-century, when the CO2 in the atmosphere is double its pre-industrial concentration. It is expected to rise 149 percent in the busy North Atlantic flight corridor, according to Paul D. Williams, a professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, UK.
"The prevalence of transatlantic wintertime clear-air turbulence will increase significantly in all aviation-relevant strength categories as the climate changes," Williams writes in a 2017 study that examines climate change's effects on turbulence in the North Atlantic corridor, the world's busiest oceanic airspace.
Turkish Airlines Flight 1 had crossed that airspace and was above Maine Saturday, just 45 minutes from landing, when the plane suddenly dropped, slamming passengers against the cabin's ceiling and walls, passengers told the Associated Press. The Boeing 777 landed safely at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, where it was met by a fleet of ambulances.
"The economic costs of turbulence arise from injuries to passengers and crew, damage to airframes and cabins, flight delays, inspections, repairs, and post-accident investigations," according to Williams, who estimates the current economic cost of turbulence incidents may be $200 million per year for United States carriers alone.
That number is likely to increase as air traffic increases—it has been growing by 5 percent per year—and as turbulence worsens.
Since Williams' 2017 study, he and other scientists expanded their scope to eight global regions regularly traversed by aircraft and found that some will see turbulence increase by several hundred percent.
"The busiest international airspace experiences the largest increases," they wrote, "with the volume of severe CAT (clear-air turbulence) approximately doubling over North America, the North Pacific, and Europe."
Other scientists have found implications of climate change for the ability of large aircraft to take off:
• Rising temperatures reduce lift for aircraft and may require weight restrictions for takeoff, especially at airports with short runways, warm temperatures or high altitudes, according to scientists from Columbia University and NASA.
• Scientists from Chinese universities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that a global average temperature increase of 1.5 or 2 degrees will require a significant increase in weight restrictions on aircraft taking off from major airports in Beijing, Shanghai, and Lasa.
Climate change is also increasing the speed of the jet stream, Williams says, which means speedier east-bound flights but slower west-bound, resulting in slower flying time and higher carbon emissions overall. Watch Williams discuss that on BBC: