Turbulence really is getting worse, and it’s not just your imagination. Over the North Atlantic, one of the world’s busiest flight corridors, severe clear-air turbulence increased by 55% between 1979 and 2020. Moderate turbulence rose 37% over the same period. The primary driver is climate change, which is strengthening the jet streams that commercial aircraft fly through every day.
What’s Actually Changing in the Atmosphere
The mechanism behind increasing turbulence starts with a basic physics principle: as carbon dioxide levels rise, different layers of the atmosphere warm at different rates. The upper atmosphere at tropical latitudes is warming faster than the air at higher latitudes and lower altitudes. This widening temperature difference between regions strengthens the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving air that flows roughly west to east at cruising altitude.
A stronger jet stream means sharper changes in wind speed over short vertical distances. Pilots call this wind shear, and it’s the direct cause of clear-air turbulence. When layers of air moving at very different speeds sit on top of each other, the boundary between them becomes unstable and breaks into chaotic, rolling waves. Your plane flies through those waves, and you feel it. Research from the University of Reading found that this vertical wind shear has been measurably increasing for decades, closely tracking rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
What makes this type of turbulence particularly unsettling is that it’s invisible. Standard cockpit weather radar detects moisture, so it can spot thunderstorms and rain well in advance. Clear-air turbulence contains no moisture at all. Even the best airborne radar systems can barely detect the most reflective patches of it, and only at about one minute’s warning. Pilots often have no idea it’s coming, which is why the seatbelt sign sometimes clicks on too late.
How Much Turbulence Has Increased
A 2023 study analyzing four decades of atmospheric data put hard numbers on the trend. At a typical point over the North Atlantic, the total annual duration of light or greater clear-air turbulence climbed from about 467 hours in 1979 to 547 hours in 2020, a 17% increase. That alone adds roughly 80 more hours per year of bumpy air in one of the most heavily traveled airspaces on Earth.
The more concerning finding is that stronger turbulence is increasing fastest. Moderate turbulence jumped from 70 hours per year to 96 hours, while severe turbulence went from about 18 hours to 27 hours annually. The pattern held over the continental United States as well. In practical terms, this means not just more frequent bumps, but more of the kind that injures flight attendants and sends unbuckled passengers into the ceiling.
Why the Worst Routes Are Getting Bumpier
Turbulence isn’t distributed evenly around the globe. Mountain ranges force air upward and create mechanical turbulence, while jet stream crossings generate the clear-air variety. The routes that combine both factors tend to be the roughest. In 2025, the forecasting site Turbli ranked the world’s most turbulent route as the short hop between Mendoza, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile, a flight that crosses the Andes at high altitude. The second most turbulent route connected Xining and Yinchuan in northwest China.
Five of the ten roughest routes in 2025 were in China, and four crossed South America. In North America, the Denver to Jackson, Wyoming, corridor made the top ten, likely due to the Rocky Mountain jet stream interaction. Europe’s bumpiest route was Nice to Geneva, crossing the Alps. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Christchurch to Wellington flight in New Zealand topped the Oceania list. All of the worst routes were short to medium haul, but the longest turbulent route identified was the 3,100-mile flight between the Cook Islands and Sydney.
These rankings shift year to year, but the general pattern is consistent: flights crossing major mountain ranges and midlatitude jet stream zones take the most punishment.
What Climate Models Project for Coming Decades
The trend is expected to accelerate. Climate simulations looking at the period from 2050 to 2080 project large increases in clear-air turbulence across the globe, with the strongest effects concentrated in the midlatitudes where most commercial flights operate. Over North America, the North Pacific, and Europe, the volume of severe turbulence is projected to roughly double.
One of the starkest projections concerns the North Atlantic corridor connecting North America and Europe: severe turbulence in the future is expected to become as common as moderate turbulence is today. That’s a meaningful shift for the roughly 2,000 flights that cross the Atlantic daily. The research also found that the increases occur across all seasons and at multiple cruising altitudes, meaning airlines won’t easily be able to route around the problem by flying higher or at different times of year.
What This Means for Passengers
Turbulence already costs the U.S. aviation industry an estimated $500 million annually, covering aircraft inspections, structural repairs, medical costs for injured passengers and crew, and fuel burned on diversions and reroutes. As turbulence intensifies, those costs will climb. Airlines are investing in better forecasting tools and real-time turbulence reporting networks, where planes that hit rough air automatically relay data to aircraft behind them.
For you as a passenger, the single most effective thing you can do is keep your seatbelt fastened whenever you’re seated, even when the sign is off. The vast majority of serious turbulence injuries happen to people who are unbuckled during sudden, unexpected encounters with clear-air turbulence. Choosing seats over the wings also helps, since that section of the fuselage moves the least during turbulence. Morning flights tend to be slightly smoother than afternoon ones, because thermal convection (heat rising from the ground) builds throughout the day.
The bumps you’re feeling more often are real, measurable, and tied to long-term atmospheric changes that are still intensifying. Aviation will adapt with better forecasting and possibly new detection technology, but rougher skies are likely the new normal for the foreseeable future.