turbulence

Could climate change increase the price of airfare tickets (consequently tour costs)?

March 23, 2014 — 4 Comments

It is really funny how the things work on internet nowadays. You start looking for something and you end reading unexpected things. I was writing and reading about what is turbulence and how to avoid it (last two posts) when I found a recent (2013) interesting paper talking about the possible intensification of turbulence activity due climate change.

The paper is quite interesting. They define turbulence in an elegant way:

…turbulence when they encounter vertical airflow that varies on horizontal length scales greater than, but roughly equal to, the size of the plane.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), suggested that cases of turbulence had risen and incidents doubled over the three-month period between October and December last year, compared to the previous quarter. Also moderate-or-greater upper-level turbulence has been found to increase over the period 1994–2005 in pilot reports in the United States. Continue reading

More about turbulence

March 5, 2014 — Leave a comment

Turbulence it is the most common cause of injury to air passengers, however it is not “dangerous” (it very is unlikely that an aircraft will fall because of it). It is caused by different aspects of the weather and the most common type experienced by aircraft is the Clear Air Turbulence (CAT). CAT is the turbulent movement of air masses in the absence of any visual cues such as clouds.

The science behind turbulence

February 25, 2014 — Leave a comment

This video gives an example of why turbulence happens. However they don’t mention that airplanes are equipped with sensors to give a warning in case they detect turbulence.