Identification

Title

Spatial patterns of turbulence near thunderstorms

Abstract

Many people have a turbulence story: perhaps a specific memorable experience or just an unpleasant flight where the seatbelt sign remained on for hours. While more rare, severe turbulence encounters can result in serious (even fatal) injuries and significant operational costs to airlines. While storms themselves are highly turbulent, they can also modify their environment in ways that lead to turbulence far from the storm. Using limited datasets, past studies indicate moderate or greater (MoG) turbulence can extend beyond current federal guidelines for avoidance (20 mi or 32 km), but many questions remain. For example, 1) What is the spatial distribution of turbulence relative to storms? 2) What environmental factors influence the spatial distribution? Now, extensive archives of radar data and automated turbulence reports from commercial aircraft allow us to thoroughly investigate turbulence near storms. To this end, we compare turbulence reports to storm locations over 9 years (2009–17) in the United States. We find that 32 km from 10-dB Z echoes at flight altitude, the risk of MoG turbulence is nearly 5 times the background occurrence and that elevated risk extends beyond 100 km. At 2 km above echo tops, the risk of MoG turbulence exceeds 20 times the background risk. This decreases exponentially but remains elevated at all vertical separation distances. Risks increase with storm intensity. Finally, when we use ERA5 reanalysis to assess environmental factors, we find increased risk with stronger mean wind and wind shear, with slightly higher risk downstream and to the left of the wind/shear vector.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7ht2tpq

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact