ATSC 113 Weather for Sailing, Flying & Snow Sports


Thunderstorm Hazards to Aviation

Learning Goal 4b. Identify thunderstorm hazards to flight & how to avoid them.  Details of these hazards are in Learning Goals 4c-h.

Hazards

Thunderstorms are convective clouds, which means they are driven by the buoyancy of warm rising air inside the cloud.

In North America, thunderstorms and their hazards are most common in Spring and Summer, when warm humid air is triggered to rise along weather boundaries such as cold fronts, sea breezes, dry lines, gust fronts, etc.

Click on the following links to get more details on these thunderstorm hazards to aviation:

  1. Convective Turbulence (learning goal 4c)
  2. Downbursts, Microbursts, Gust Fronts & Low-level Wind Shear (learning goal 4d)
  3. Lightning & Precipitation Static (learning goal 4e)
  4. Hail (learning goal 4f)
  5. Tornadoes (learning goal 4g)
  6. Heavy Rain (learning goal 4h)
  7. And additional hazards associated with all clouds: ceiling, visibility, icing, and frontal hazards (learning goals 1d, 1e, 3g, and 3h).

Safety Recommendations for Flight near Thunderstorms

All aviation authorities require that you do NOT fly through thunderstorms. The US and Canada recommend that pilots stay at least 20 nautical miles away from thunderstorms.

Also, civilian pilots should NOT try to fly over the tops of thunderstorms, because the storm can increase in thickness so fast that the tops rise to engulf an aircraft trying to fly over it. Once engulfed by the thunderstorm, the aircraft and pilot would likely experience violent IFR weather conditions.

For pilots flying on instruments (IFR), air traffic controllers re-route aircraft to avoid the heaviest parts of the storm. This YouTube shows how landing traffic was re-routed, and sometimes put into race-track-shaped holding patterns, until the storm moved away from the Atlanta, Georgia airport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWv4wyy_Jqg

Keywords: ceiling, convective clouds, convective turbulence, downbursts, gust fronts, hail, heavy rain, icing, IFR, lightning, low-level wind shear, microbursts, precipitation static, thunderstorms, tornadoes, visibility

Extra info for experts; not needed for this course.

For safety recommendations, see:

CANADA

USA

Image credits. Thunderstorm photo by Dr. Wolf Read, used with permission.

UBC ATSC 113 - Weather for Sailing, Flying & Snow Sports. Copyright © 2016 - 2019 by Roland Stull.
Last updated Jan 2019