Column | See where your flights will experience this climate-fueled turbulence

It gets bumpy traveling with a toddler. On a descent into JFK airport, we experienced stomach lurching turbulence. The buckle signs turned on, and I secured my 3-year-old daughter, while maintaining a composed face. I checked in to see how she was feeling as the dining carts rattled against the cabin’s hollow plastic walls. “I like the bouncing!” she exclaimed, and we landed without a hitch.

It was such a sunny day too, I remembered thinking as we deplaned. I scrolled and learned that turbulence accounts for a majority of weather-related accidents in the United States. Clear-air turbulence, like we experienced, can happen without warning on a cloudless day, injuring passengers and crew by violently throwing them.

So I wondered: Should I add severe turbulence to the list of weather events my daughter will experience as the Earth warms? Short answer, yes. Studies show these events are happening more often now than 40 years ago. And a recent study by Mohamed Foudad, a researcher in turbulence modeling at the University of Reading, identified areas where a hotter atmosphere makes for even rougher skies in the following decades.

Why the Southwest will experience more turbulence

While at the University of Toulouse, Foudad led a study where he combined 11 climate models to predict where more extreme and dangerous forms of clear-air turbulence would increase. He said, “by using all these climate models … we have now a high confidence at each degree of warming that we have an increase in this turbulence.” The map above simulates the impact of a 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) increase from preindustrial temperatures which, according to some estimates, could fall before 2055.

These severe cases are more than a bump in the sky. These conditions result in sudden changes in altitude and loss of airspeed that are a risk for passengers, crew and the plane. A drop like this could throw a person from their seat or send a phone flying. It is the type of incident that is federally required to be recorded in the U.S.

Incidents of severe turbulence are in addition to an increasing trend observed decades ago. Paul D. Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading, said “today there’s 55 percent more severe turbulence over the North Atlantic than there was in 1979 and 41 percent more over North America.” At this year’s European Geosciences Union conference, Williams predicted that turbulence along the world’s busiest routes over the Atlantic Ocean may increase by four times as much over the next few decades.

A graphic explaining the clear-air turbulence and how it is created between warmer and colder air currents in the jet stream.

Hotter air moves faster and typically, higher than cold air. As it moves more rapidly, colder air is pulled up to fill in those gaps, causing what’s known as “vertical wind shear.” Aircraft experience these tumbling eddies as turbulence.

As climate change strengthens temperatures in the tropics, hotter air is meeting the cooler Northern air in greater contrast. Williams says, “the temperature drop across the jet stream at cruising altitudes is being made stronger, and that is increasing the wind shear, which in turn is generating more turbulence.”

Globally, Foudad’s research found that northern Africa and central Asia, along the most populated parts of China, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, will see large increases of severe turbulence in the atmosphere as a result.

This doesn’t mean the rest of the United States is off the hook. A 2023 analysis of historic changes in clear-air turbulence found that the largest global increases occurred over the continental U.S. and the North Atlantic Ocean. A 2019 paper determined that as temperatures have risen over the past four decades, vertical wind shear in the Northern Hemisphere has increased, as the temperature difference in the polar jet stream has widened.

Beyond sparking an existential panic during your flight, the biggest problem turbulence poses is how it harms the plane you’re taking. What may be 20-second increases for individual passengers add more than 120 hours of additional strain over the lifetime of the aircraft. Stress on these jets may shorten their expected lifespan by years.

Map of the top three routes impacted by length of journey.

“If there’s twice as much turbulence, then there’s twice as much fatigue, twice as much wear-and-tear,” Williams said, adding that airlines would have to perform maintenance twice as often because the planes have “effectively flown twice as many hours in turbulence, even though they’ve flown the same number of hours in the atmosphere.” No one has yet estimated how much more it would cost to increase maintenance to keep airlines safe.

Fatal incidents from turbulence are rare, but not unheard of. The 2023 Singapore Airlines experienced severe turbulence that killed one passenger, while injuring 71 others.

What can airlines do about clear-air turbulence?

Forecasters already make predictions where clear-air turbulence will impact flights, though it is difficult to track with satellite or radar. When Williams started his career in 1999, he said he spoke with pilots who ignored turbulence forecasts, finding them “rubbish … always wrong.” But the predictions have improved, Williams said, from 60 percent accuracy to 80 percent today.

The airline industry is also trying something else: tracking clear-air turbulence in real time. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) offers a platform called the Turbulence Aware, where participating airlines receive live data of incidents along their routes.

Williams called displaying live turbulence data in the cockpit a “game changer. It doesn’t involve someone picking up a radio and talking to air traffic control, then air traffic control passing it on.” Still, it costs money to reroute a flight, he said, and it adds to the overall journey time, Williams says.

Stuart Fox, IATA’s director of flight and technical operations, says the data help pilots make informed decisions. “Safety trumps everything … the information used by the pilots, either before departure or at the flight planning stage, can help the pilots and crew be aware of what to expect.”

As turbulence is projected to increase globally by the mid-century, researchers caution that planes being manufactured now should be designed for a more turbulent atmosphere.

Meanwhile, air traffic along the U.S. Southwest will only continue to grow, Foudad said. “It’s hard to say that airlines will not be impacted by this extreme weather shifting with global warming.” Given how much turbulence stands to change, it might be hard to avoid at all.