How Turbulence Can Go From An Inconvenience To A Deadly Experience? Meteorologist Explains

4 months ago

A 73-year-old passenger died and several others were injured during a Singapore Airlines flight Tuesday after the plane encountered severe turbulence. Certified Consulting Meteorologist with DTN Daniel Lennartson joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the causes of turbulence and what you should do on a flight should you experience it.

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Transcript

00:00 Earlier this week a passenger died and several others were injured on after

00:05 Singapore Airlines flight experienced extreme turbulence. Obviously this is

00:09 really heartbreaking to hear. It's also very scary if you are someone who does

00:13 travel via plane. I am curious though how does turbulence go from an

00:18 inconvenience that some experience on a flight to something that causes injury

00:22 and in this case was deadly? Well there's different grades of turbulence from

00:28 different physical forces. One of those is thunderstorms can be a very extreme

00:33 case and others are clear turbulence and those are more

00:40 from disturbed flow, large-scale flow, but also clear turbulence can also be

00:46 associated with areas of deep thunderstorms because when you

00:53 have a strong updraft that causes these thunderstorms it disturbs the flow and

00:58 some of these flows can be in layers. Some of the layers in the atmosphere are

01:01 more stable than others so when you rip through all those layers,

01:07 the stable layers like when I'm talking about stable, that means if you

01:11 push it up or push it down it's gonna have a restoring force it's gonna bring

01:14 it back. So if you disturb that flow it's gonna emanate. Kind of similar to

01:19 like if you ever stir a water in a bucket and then you move that

01:25 in circulation you see waves emanating from that flow. The atmosphere

01:31 works the same way. It's compressible instead of incompressible like water but

01:35 it works the similar way. So in a case like a plane going in even

01:41 nearby a thunderstorm complex can be affected even though they think it's

01:47 coming out of thin air because they're not going through the cloud but

01:50 depending on that layer they can emanate farther or shorter away

01:56 from that that thunderstorm complex depending on the environment. Clean air

02:01 turbulence is the most dangerous type of turbulence. Can you talk about why? Well

02:08 as I mentioned it looks like it's coming out of nowhere because you're

02:12 not going through a cloud. All of a sudden bang it hits you. It's invisible. It's kind of

02:17 like waves in water except for water you can see it air you cannot. Sometimes you

02:21 can see it in like a cirrus deck if you look on a nice day you'll see wave

02:26 patterns in the in the clouds. That's a gravity wave. So an air... Oh go ahead.

02:33 No you go ahead. So anyway if a plane went through that those areas where

02:40 there's waves they might get a little bit of turbulence from that and that's

02:44 about the only way you would see it and clouds look different from from where

02:47 you are in a cockpit versus when you're seeing it from the ground. So is

02:53 there any way for a pilot to see this before they're in it or is it just a

02:58 sort of freak accident because it is essentially invisible? There well there

03:05 actually you cannot see it with the naked eye but there is guidance. There's

03:08 there's ways that we can forecast it that have very reasonable quality that

03:14 can depict what could happen in it. It predicts like I mentioned the

03:21 stability of the layers. The numerical models predict that and then we

03:27 apply algorithms to those known algorithms that that work that predict

03:34 the the intensity of that turbulence depending on what that flow and the

03:40 stability is like. So on some of these things that can happen is like shear is

03:45 it is one one very high probability of causing a turbulence. It basically makes

03:51 way if you ever see white caps on on water it's kind of like breaking waves.

03:55 So that the atmosphere works the same except you can't see them in the

04:00 atmosphere. So that's where you really have to rely on these very sophisticated

04:07 numerical weather models. There's several of them the United States has ECMWF from

04:11 from Europe. They're very high quality and if you if you can predict what the

04:16 atmospheric conditions are like you have a great chance of predicting where that

04:20 that turbulence may occur. And usually when a pilot finds him him or herself in

04:26 this type of turbulence is there any indication of how long the average is

04:31 that it usually lasts or does it just depend? Oh sure you with these with these

04:37 forecasts you can you can actually plot plan. There's there's two two levels

04:42 there's one of them is the planning. So you can look ahead ahead of the time and

04:47 and plot your course so that you avoid the turbulence or tactical. And this is

04:52 some kind of a now cast product that is that is a pipe right to the cockpit that

04:58 that maybe the the pilots can react.

How Turbulence Can Go From An Inconvenience To A Deadly Experience? Meteorologist Explains

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