Sunday, August 2, 2015

Weather for Flying – Turbulence


We noticed this on the MetService blog --

"Have you ever thought that for aeroplane pilots, every day at work is a blue-sky day? Soaring above the clouds you might think that the weather isn’t such a big deal. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Pilots are dependent on weather information at every stage in their flights. In this blog post, we discuss one crucial aspect of aviation weather that affects both pilots and passengers – turbulence.

The nature of turbulence

"Most of us have experienced aircraft turbulence before, but what is it? Look at the middle of a deep, wide river, and chances are the water is running smoothly like in the photo below – we call this laminar flow. Look near the edges, where the water flows in eddies and swirls – we call this turbulent flow. If you look more closely at the eddies, you’ll notice that within each big swirl of water, there are many smaller ones. Within them, smaller ones again."

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