made international news earlier this month when and more than 30 injured. Then, just a few days later, a during severe turbulence on a Turkish Airlines flight. in the news this weeks suggests that maybe turbulence really has gotten worse.
Then again, we’re also living at a time where , so it’s also possible we’re just hearing about it more because people are already paying attention. A review of recent research, though, shows that’s not the case. For example, there’s a 2023 paper by studied trends in clear-air turbulence, a type of turbulence that occurs without clouds or thunderstorms present, and the results don’t paint a pretty picture.
While light-or-greater CAT only increased 17 percent over the North Atlantic between 1979 and 2020, moderate-or-greater CAT increased by 37 percent, and severe-or-greater CAT jumped a whopping 55 percent. So it’s not just that turbulence is happening more frequently. We’re also seeing more severe turbulence.
from Dr. Paul D. Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in the UK who also co-authored the previous study.
The paper used a computer model to estimate how much worse turbulence will get when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles. According to the study, we can expect light, moderate and severe turbulence to increase 59, 94 and 149 percent respectively. So expect bad turbulence to only get worse going forward.
Those findings are also backed up by another 2023 paper , which found that .
