ACINN Graduate Seminar - WS 2025/26

2025-10-22 at 12:00 (on-line and on-site)

Clear-Air Turbulence in a Changing Climate

Mohamed Foudad

University of Reading, UK

 

Aviation is both a driver of climate change and increasingly impacted by it. One of the most significant impacts is on clear-air turbulence (CAT), a type of atmospheric turbulence that occurs away from a visible convective activity. CAT cannot be detected visually by pilots or by using onboard radar and is the leading cause of weather-related in-flight injuries in commercial aviation.

In this talk, recent research on CAT and climate change, CAT-aware flight routing, and the development of a new CAT diagnostic will be presented. First, it will be shown that CAT frequency has increased in several regions of the Northern Hemisphere over recent decades, and future climate projections indicate further CAT intensification at cruising altitudes across various global warming scenarios. It will then be demonstrated that North Atlantic weather regimes and CAT are strongly linked, and that incorporating this information into a flight planning model can support safer and more fuel-efficient routes. Finally, a new mathematical formulation of the Richardson number (Ri) will be introduced, derived from the full turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget that incorporates both vertical and horizontal wind shear. Results show that the new Ri performs better than the conventional Ri and other indices. Furthermore, combining the new Ri with additional diagnostics leads to significant improvements in upper-level turbulence forecasting.

 

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