Turbulence Detection Listen in RealAudio Email Your Comments

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
One of the most troubling experiences for both the airlines and airplane passengers is air turbulence. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. On type of tubulence, called convective turbulence is caused by the updrafts in thunderstorms and pilots have radar, and their own eyes, to see turbulance coming. But sometimes that's not enough:

Larry Cornman

"Typically the way they're vectoring around is one, by their eye---seeing a storm and trying to get around it"

That's Larry Cornman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR, in Boulder, CO.

"but also, they have an onboard weather radar which gives them essentially a color-coded display based on the amount of reflectivity in the cloud. The reflectivity is based on the amount of water droplets or hail or ice inside the cloud. So they're looking at these areas painted red on their screen and they're saying, hey, I want to stay away from those. Now, the problem is that turbulence is not necessarily correlated to this large reflectivity. So they may be moving away from an area with lots of hail, for example, but they may be flying right into an area of high turbulence which isn't painted red on their screen."

Cornman is working on detecting this invisible turbulance, finding the best way to deal with the challange:

"Well, there's two ways of dealing with it. One is you have some detection methodology -- a sensor, for example on the ground or plane and the other option is to have better forecasts."

Advanced warning of turbulance to pilots likely will come from a combination of forecasting and detection. Our show's Senior Editor is Jay Allison. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.