Climate change related CBs ?

[ATC Watcher]

Lots of rather very violent CBs everywhere it seems at the moment . e,g Delhi Airport terminal roof collapse, or the flooding and closure of the Geneva air traffic control center , only to mention 2 events directly related to CB activity that are affecting Aviation that occurred in the last days ..


Last Thursday I was flying (VFR) with CAVOK and 4/8 Cu base a 6000ft . In less that 30 min one of the first CU turned into a towering one ( normal in Summer with high temperatures) , but then into a min-CB , very isolated, Lightning inside and then extremely heavy rain followed ( 50l/m2 estimated in an hour or so ) flooding parts of the airfield I was planning to go in . I fly since almost 60 years and never saw such a thing in Europe. So fast and so much rain as a result, The top of this CB never exceeded 20-25.000 Ft ( my estimate) . There are photos of such “mini CBs” floating on Internet./ X

Is this just an exceptional phenomena this year or it is climate change and we are going to have to live with it, from now on ?

[gums]

Salute!

Remember, "climate" is what you expect getting off the plane on the ramp, but "weather" is what you get.

We have had and will continue to have periods of "non-standard" weather patterns. ATC and I are old enuf to have seen them, especially being aviators and not trapped to a single place day after day. And I wonder how it was a hundred years ago in the U.S. dust bowl period. If there's any long term (coupla hundred years) pattern of concern, it's the return to the next glacial cycle, and we are there right now. So maybe the "change" is already upon us, and it ain't gonna be high temperatures or a few meters of sea level change.

Gums sends...

[galaxy flyer]

You may not have seen it in EU, but I have seen rapidly developing TRW going into Ramstein a number of times beginning about 35 years ago. 45 years ago a C-141 was torn apart approaching Mildenhall in rapidly strengthening TRW. I remember because it happened on UPT graduation day and our class had four -141 would be pilots.

[Loose rivets]

One of the books we couldn't buy second hand for the 60's ALTP (ATPL) studies was Aviation Meteorology. It was big, hardback and expensive. 50/= IIRC. The reason it was not available used, was that it was so good we all resolved to keep our copies for the rest of our lives. I remember its detailed descriptions of the weather between Dakar and Recife, four different seasons. Had to know that, and I got it as a high points question. Another thing was the Something Front. ???? The theoretical front EW across the UK. When finally I realised what it was getting at, it was really nifty - and average structured summing of the normal curly fronts over one year. When the Azores High gave us a stable high pressure for a long summer, this 'front' would be shoved north.

I rambled on to my pilot pal about the number of mini fronts we're seeing now. "Ah, that's because the detection is so much more accurate." Hmmm . . . sounded sensible - for a few years. Now, you may as well throw these tomes away.

Some years ago I rambled on in a PPRuNe thread about Global Warming and unstable systems. 'It won't gradually happen' I cried, 'It'll just suddenly flop in one catastrophic direction, and hello Moscow weather.' You'll have to define, Suddenly, but I still think that. Servo control of our weather, a tiny input amplified to vast energy changes. I'd rather not be right.

Here's a thing. I live on the coast near the Clacton CLN beacon. Been here since the war. In recent years the sky on the horizon doesn't look right. If pushed for a description, I'd have to say 'Lots of small build-ups. Tiny CB's even.' Well, that's apart from cities of wind turbines. I detest them, about as much as the mass of metal that defines the western North Sea. I'm south of Harwich and Parkeston, and all that means. Some days the horizon seems to be solid metal. If a few of the largest container ships on the planet are waiting their turn, it looks like someone's put a city just over the horizon. That's a lot of metal and one gargantuan heating element.
I've been looking at that horizon from a bather's viewpoint for decades, and when I got a gut feeling things were changing, they probably were.

[Chris2303]

One of the books we couldn't buy second hand for the 60's ALTP (ATPL) studies was Aviation Meteorology. It was big, hardback and expensive. 50/= IIRC.

Do you have the author's name?

[megan]

The Air Ministry Meteorological Office "Handbook of Aviation Meteorology" perhaps? Mine is a 1960 copy.

[Tu.114]

From a subjective standpoint.

When I was first let loose on the line, in the very early 2000s, I found CBs to be a fairly infrequent encounter over Europe. A squall line or a large CB cluster painted on the weather radar screen was such a rare occurence that I usually found it worthy of getting the camera out and taking a picture. Granted, the excitement upon meeting such a phenomenon was maybe partially due to its novelty, me having been at an earlier stage of studying the ropes than I may be today.

A few years have elapsed. Many were nearly clear of thunderstorms, a few brought some more of them. But still, I seem to remember CBs more of a local feature, clustering in areas the size of, say, Slovenia once every few weeks or coming running by in shape of a very active cold front. There even was a day of freak thunderstorms rearing their anvils in mid-January about 10 years ago.

The years since about 2020, including the present one, appear to me to be on the more active side. Flying around Southern and Central Europe has required noticeable avoidance headings nearly every day this spring and summer, and flight planning nearly always involved minding movements of fronts and looking out for CB-free alternates both enroute and around the destination. The large-scale summer high pressure area that traditionally keeps those things at bay is still awol.

The question remains - is this due to short-time weather phenomena or long-term climate change? Certainly, a single drivers impression is not representative. However, I´d dare say that the atmosphere around here carries more water recently, possibly due to warmer oceans, and cool, moist air drawn over hot continents just does its thing.

A look at El Nino might be in order; it has been active in the last years but is reported to slowly dissipate. It may be that some of the situation is explained by this phenomenon, if so, the next years might become a little smoother.

[hoistop]

Generally, it is quite obvious in my part of the world (south-eastern side of of Alps), that temperatures on average are rising rapidly. In my span of flying (35 years) I noticed not only, that local lake does not freeze anymore in winter, (as a kid, I walked on it every winter, my kids did it only once 13 years ago) but as member of glider pilot community I also noticed significant changes in weather patterns in those short 35 years span and diversion from traditional patterns is occuring, say, last 10 years. Since ever it was typical to get inversion in summer in our area, preventing any serious glider flying as it limited us to 700-900m AGL, to be broken only by cold front passing - for a day or two. Now, we regularly see good thermals also in July and August, and also September - that was traditionally for local flying only, as, once summer inversion got away, we could fly higher again, but thermals were too weak to do any significant cross country flights. But there is also much more moisture in the air and we see more of a severe thunderstorms, causing damage. (Today afternoon we expect another one.) Also, on Saturday, we got another load of sand from Sahara, (making everything dirty), for the third time this year - in past decades, this was a rare phenomena, occuring once a year or even less. I would say that more energy and higher sea temperatures bring more moisture in the air, so more chance for CBs and more energy available to break thru inversion at higher altitudes. And, oh, an airport on the east (LJMB) is closed indefinitelly for commercial traffic since two weeks ago, as 5-7cm hail totaly destroyed terminal roof. Never happened before.
I am also part of sea sailing community and I know some people, doing sailboat transfers across Mediterannean, started thinking not to do it in the summer anymore, as it seems that violent weather became more common and thus more difficult to avoid in the summer season.
All in all, it seems we will have to adapt to those changes, not pretend, they are not here. And old book`s visdom not necessarily apply anymore.

[ETOPS]

I sometimes glance at this lightning map and definitely see increased activity over the years.

https://www.lightningmaps.org

[Luc Lion]

... or an increased network of sensors ...

[Peter H]

The Air Ministry Meteorological Office "Handbook of Aviation Meteorology" perhaps? Mine is a 1960 copy.

... 2nd hand now from £6

Change to your currency & location in https://tinyurl.com/3mtbxsc8

[ATC Watcher]

Excellent site ETOPS thanks., , There always were Thunderstorms in Europe in the Summer , and end of June is always a standard convective period. It is not the number of them which is the issue I raised, But how fast they develop and producing so much precipitations in a very short time causing damages, also to our Aviation infrastructure. One meteorologist in our airport says it is because of the unusual record high temperature of the North Atlantic ocean (*) . Again the question remains : is it a one off year , or are we going to have to live with it in the future ?


(*) This web site explains a bit the phenomena : https://climate.copernicus.eu/record-breaking-north-atlantic-ocean-temperatures-contribute-extreme-marine-heatwaves (https://climate.copernicus.eu/record-breaking-north-atlantic-ocean-temperatures-contribute-extreme-marine-heatwaves)

[Loose rivets]

Chris2303, sadly not. I kept everything until one day I decided to go to the US to do grandparenting. I think it might well have been Handbook of . . .

It was a dark pale greenish plain hardback. We were told it was all one needed to know. However, it was my great good fortune to swat the night before the exam with a BEA pilot that had their in house Met publication. One item was the Mistral and the frontal system curling back on Nice. Very nice paperback with exam-passing diagrams.

I've posted many times about a night flight I did in the 60's. G-ATDU. 26-8-66 Forty minutes into French airspace we hit CB's. That was a long long flight to Barcelona. The British Eagle Viscount seemed to manage to recover from any attitude - the horizons being off the scale many times. Excursions 14 to 20 thousand feet. On the way back we popped out of post-frontal air into a star filled night. We could see every town in France. The one single bolt headed up out of a CB before turning down to us. I was flying and my skipper had just struck his Zippo as it hit. The most goddam violent bang which left a 4" hole top and bottom of the starboard wing. We survived because it went around the fuel. Colin Stephens. Good bloke.