One of the most significant turbulence events in recent American history happened on Wednesday night during a flight out of Salt Lake City International Airport.
In all, 25 passengers and crew were injured when a Delta Air Lines flight headed to Amsterdam encountered extreme turbulence over southwestern Wyoming, bouncing the plane over 1,000 feet in either direction. Flight DL56 diverted to Minneapolis, where those injured received medical attention.
Turbulence events aren’t unusual in the skies, but to see that many people injured is. It’s also pretty unusual to see this amount of turbulence hit such a big airliner like the Airbus A330-900neo, a widebody craft with room for 281 flyers — in general, the bigger the plane, the less turbulence affects it.
Naturally, the incident has gotten some flyers nervous, especially Utahns who frequently leave from SLC. So I figured I’d take a look at turbulence in and around the airport, giving you some information and some ways to find specific turbulence forecasts for your next flight.
Salt Lake City among top airports for turbulence
In my time writing data columns for The Salt Lake Tribune, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more impressed with a single-purpose website than I am with Turbli.com.
Built by Ignacio Gallego-Marcos, an engineer in the field of computational fluid dynamics in Sweden, Turbli is both highly technically informational and highly readable about the topic of turbulence; usually, you get one or the other. As a result, Turbli’s going to be a repeated source throughout this article.
First, we’re going to look at which airports are most susceptible to turbulence around them. Turbli creates this list. First, it takes a snapshot of the world’s eddy dissipation rate (a measure of turbulence) every six hours. Then, for each of the world’s 550 largest airports, it takes the area 120 miles in diameter around that airport, and compiles the eddy dissipation rate in those snapshots on a monthly and annual basis. The methodology makes sense to me.
By this, Salt Lake City ranked No. 4 in North America’s most turbulent airports. Only Denver, Bozeman, and Albuquerque ranked higher.
Salt Lake City ranks fourth on the list of North American airports with highest average turbulence. (https://turbli.com/historical-data/most-turbulent-airports-of-2024/)
As you might expect, routes to and from these airports are most commonly turbulent. In fact, five routes to and from Salt Lake City are in the top 10 most turbulent routes in North America.
(https://turbli.com/historical-data/most-turbulent-flight-routes-of-2024/)
Look at those eddy dissipation rates in both charts, though. By Turbli’s scale, EDRs are sorted into 0-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80, and 80-100 buckets, on a scale from light turbulence to extreme turbulence. While Salt Lake City has among the nation’s highest rates of turbulence, the EDRs stay below 20 — which means that, more often than not, the routes have just light turbulence.
In short, while there is more turbulence out of SLC than almost anywhere else, most Salt Lake flights aren’t very turbulent.
How is climate change impacting turbulence?
The short news: Climate change will impact turbulence. It will likely make routes across the southern U.S. more turbulent while making those in the northern U.S. slightly less turbulent.
That’s the main result in research presented in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres in 2024. A team of French scientists used 11 different computer models to simulate how air currents would change under different conditions of global warming: if the Earth were to warm by one degree, two degrees, or three degrees Celsius.
Changes in moderate or greater turbulence at different global warming levels; browns indicate less turbulence, while greens indicate more turbulence. (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2023JD040261)
What you see is more turbulence along the jet stream that cuts across the southern United States and northern Africa, but slightly less turbulence in places like northern Utah.
The Washington Post took this result and created a calculator that lets you see the amount of time you might feel moderate turbulence on individual routes in the two degrees Celsius scenario. For example, a northern route from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis would see four seconds fewer of turbulence, while a southern route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles would see seven seconds more of turbulence on average.
How much turbulence will be on your next flight?
Forecasting turbulence is tricky, but we have improved at it significantly.
Right now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides a Graphical Turbulence Guidance model that estimates turbulent conditions down to a resolution of 13 kilometers. The forecasts go out to 48 hours at a maximum, but are, as you’d expect, much more accurate the closer you are to the time of your flight.
But turbulence forecasts are kind of like tornado forecasts: They can tell you conditions are ripe for a tornado and that one is likely to form, but can’t tell you with certainty what neighborhood it will form in or even whether one will appear. Obviously, planes are far smaller than 13 kilometers; a new version of the Graphical Turbulence Guidance model that lowers the resolution down to 3 kilometers is slated for January 2026, but even that doesn’t give you the resolution you’d ideally want.
Still, the forecasts are useful. They’re about 75% accurate, University of Reading professor Paul Williams told the BBC this week.
Turbli takes these forecasts and turns them into useful data for individual flights. Type in the route you’re taking in the next 48 hours, and Turbli will show you a list of flights on that route. Select your flight, and it will present to you a turbulence forecast over the course of your flight — adjusted for the type of aircraft you’re flying. Here’s Delta’s 5:20 p.m. flight from Salt Lake City to Dallas on August 1, for example.
A Turbli flight forecast, from Salt Lake City to Dallas on Aug. 1. (turbli.com)
The forecast calls for some bumps in takeoff and at landing, with the hardest turbulence likely reaching the moderate stage in the middle as the route encounters some thunderstorms.
The hope, of course, is that your pilot will deviate your flight to avoid those mid-flight bumps and thunderstorms — but the pilot on Delta Flight 56 on Wednesday chose not to over the skies of Wyoming, for whatever reason. We’ll learn more about why after the National Transportation Safety Board releases its preliminary report on the matter, which usually takes about a month.
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