Air turbulence from a storm can start earlier than you expect

This is your captain speaking: You may need to buckle those seatbelts a lot sooner than you're used to

- KATHERINE KORNEI

Rattled nerves and spilled drinks are the most common outcomes of a choppy flight, but intense air turbulence can also cause bodily harm. And while one well-known cause of air turbulence is thunderstorms, it's poorly understood how far from a tempest shaky conditions are likely to persist. To answer that question, researchers recently analyzed millions of measurements of air turbulence collected by commercial aircraft.

The team found that a heightened risk of a jarring flight extended more than 55 miles away from a thunderstorm, which is roughly three times the storm-avoidance distance currently recommended by the Federal Aviation Administration. These findings, published this month in The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, could inform new guidelines for storm avoidance, the researchers suggest.

Pilots and dispatch crews on the ground have long kept an eye trained on the weather. "The links between meteorology and aviation go way, way back," said Stacey Hitchcock, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.