How does turbulence work?
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Answers
Explanation:
The most common cause is turbulent air in the atmosphere. Jet streams trigger sudden changes in wind speed that can rock the plane
Answer:
The definition of turbulence is fairly straightforward: chaotic and capricious eddies of air, disturbed from a calmer state by various forces. If you’ve ever watched a placid thread of rising smoke break up into ever more disorganized swirls, you’ve witnessed turbulence.
Rough air happens everywhere, from ground level to far above cruising altitude. But the most common turbulence experienced by flyers has three common causes: mountains, jet streams, and storms.
Just as ocean waves break on a beach, air also forms waves as it encounters mountains. While some air passes smoothly over and onward, some air masses crowd against the mountains themselves, left with nowhere to go but up. These “mountain waves” can propagate as wide, gentle oscillations into the atmosphere, but they can also break up into many tumultuous currents, which we experience as turbulence.
Disorderly air associated with jet streams—the narrow, meandering bands of swift winds located near the poles—is caused by differences in wind velocities as an aircraft moves away from regions of maximum wind speeds. The decelerating winds create shear regions that are prone to turbulence.
And though it’s easy to understand turbulence created by thunderstorms, a relatively new discovery by researchers is that storms can generate bumpy conditions in faraway skies. The rapid growth of storm clouds pushes air away, generating waves in the atmosphere that can break up into turbulence hundreds to even thousands of miles away, says Robert Sharman, a turbulence researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).