AVOIDING TURBULENCE NEAR THUNDERSTORMS

摘要

Turbulence is an ImportantSafety and Opeartional hazard for the aviation industry. It is responsible for hundreds of injuries around the world each year, occasionally causes aircraft damage, occupant injuries, is the source of millions of dollars of additional operational costs for commercial airlines (which ultimately increases the cost of air travel), and can cause major disruptions to air traffic. Aircraft generally attempt to avoid turbulence - especially regions of severe turbulence - whenever possible through the strategic use of aviation weather forecasts and/or tactical maneuvers. Yet, turbulence owes its existence to a variety of atmospheric processes (e.g., jet streams, terrain-induced flows, and thunderstorms) and each of these processes requires its own unique forecasting or avoidance strategy tailored to the mechanisms underlying the source. Unfortunately, progress in improving avoidance methods for a number of these sources is hampered by an incomplete understanding of the governing atmospheric dynamics, especially with respect to Convectively Induced Turbulence (CIT), which occurs in and around thunderstorms. CIT has been estimated to be responsible for 60 percent of turbulence-related aircraft accidents (Cornman and Carmichael 1993). In another study by Kaplan et al. (2005), 86 percent of 44 aviation accident cases were found to be within 100 km of convection.