Weathered Questions 5.5

Okay, so let's get into some questions today.

This one comes in from Leo in Urbandale and he asked, why is it turbulent when you fly through the clouds? What's going on?

Very good question.

And as we go throughout this episode, realize that neither Jan nor myself are licensed pilots.

But we do know how the atmosphere works.

And we specialize in weather

on the ground.

Yes, we do know why some of these and what we're going to call our really basic questions today.

We're not getting into microbursts or all that kind of stuff.

We're getting into the everyday type of stuff that if you've been on an airplane, you may have observed yourself.

And that's we're going to be answering the questions for today.

When you're flying through the clouds, that's a great question.

So first off, we have to think about how clouds are formed.

Well, the vast majority of them, let's just take cirrus clouds out for a second.

Cirrus are those really high, thin, wispy ones.

You're at cruising altitude when you go through those.

And there's not a whole lot of bumping going on there because there's really not a whole lot of mass to those.

But what about an average cumulus cloud? So that's the one that looks like a cotton ball floating in the sky.

To get a cumulus cloud to form, it does need its own little updraft and its own little downdraft.

And even though you can't see it with your eyes from the ground, or if you're a pilot, there is an up and down circulation going on in front of you.

It's not enough to cause problems, but it is enough to potentially roughen your flight a little bit.

And if you do fly through a cloud layer, stratus can be the same way, especially if you've got rain going on.

So those would be nimbus clouds.

If you're going through that, in order to generate those raindrops, you're generating at least some upward motion in the atmosphere, and it's going to hit the bottom of the plane, and it's going to bounce around a little bit.

I will tell you that that kind of turbulence is not as far as I understand, harmful at all to any aircraft.