Invisible Danger: Increased by over 50 percent

 

Airplane accidents
 

The invisible sinkholes in the air will become more and more numerous

Jonathan Jeppsson

Digging manager and climate columnist

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Updated 17.13 | Published 17.08

One person died and around 30 were injured during the horror flight. Photo: East2west News

Extreme air turbulence in clear air has increased by 55 percent since 1979.

The invisible danger, almost impossible to detect and predict, will become more and more common.

The reason is spelled climate change.

Aviation experts suspect that so-called clear air turbulence was behind the fatal accident on the plane between London and Singapore. "To 90 percent, I think it's about clear air turbulence," says aviation expert Jan Ohlsson to TT, who calls the phenomenon a "sinkhole in the air". But as always with plane accidents, he says, it is often not one cause but several that are behind it. It is still too early to set anything in stone.

Normal turbulence, which occurs due to atmospheric pressure, flying over a mountain or through a storm, is usually predictable.

But with clear air turbulence it is different – it is almost invisible and difficult to detect. It can come on unexpectedly, when the passengers are not buckled up.
 

Increased by 55 percent

Researchers at the University of Reading have been able to show that severe turbulence has increased by 55 percent between 1979 and 2020 on a busy route across the North Atlantic. The increase, the researchers believe, is about changes in wind speed at high altitudes, which in turn is due to warming due to carbon dioxide emissions.

"After a decade of research showing that climate change will increase clear-air turbulence in the future, we now have evidence to suggest that the increase has already begun," said Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading who co-authored the study.
 

Another study highlights that the greatest increase in clear-air turbulence in the future will occur in East Asia.
 

Up to five billion

The turbulence is a costly story. It costs the aviation industry in the USA between SEK 1.5 and 5 billion extra every year in damages and wear and tear. From 2009 to 2022, there were 163 serious injuries related to turbulence on commercial flights in the United States.

We often think of climate change as something big and dramatic; floods, forest fires, heat waves and severe storms. But this is how climate change creeps into our everyday lives, stealthy tentacles that are difficult to detect at first.
 

The beer suddenly doesn't taste like it used to. The wine becomes more xpensive. More and more people are getting bitten by dogs for some reason. We sleep less and less. The light reflected from the Earth becomes increasingly faint. 

 

And planes suddenly free fall without warning.

 

           

Aviation turbulence is increasing, one of the reasons for that is climate change. Photo: Ethan Swope/AP