Does air traffic affect our weather?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anyone else had their flight cancelled? The COVID 19 pandemic has had a huge impact on air travel – air traffic in 2020 is expected to be down 50 per cent on last year. But beyond the obvious disruption to business and people’s lives, how might the quieter skies affect our weather and climate? One curious listener, Jeroen Wijnands, who lives next to Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, noticed how there were fewer clouds and barely any rainfall since the flights dropped off. Could airplanes affect our local weather? Also, did we learn anything from another occasion when airplanes were grounded, during the post-9/11 shutdown? How will the current period impact our future climate? Marnie Chesterton investigates this question and discovers some of the surprising effects that grounded aircraft are having: on cloud formation, forecasting and climate change. Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, Producer: Dom Byrne
[Photo:Commercial airplane parking at the airport. Credit: Getty Images]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.5 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.6 | Hello there, welcome to Crowd Science with me, Marnie Chesterton. In normal times, this show travels a fair bit, tracking down the best people around the world to answer your science questions. In this new normal, I barely leave |
| 0:46.0 | the house. My new fun game is called Fantasy Holidays Online, so what I do is I scour certain websites looking and almost buying |
| 0:56.4 | trips to beautiful places I know that I'm not going to be flying to anytime soon. |
| 1:01.1 | In the past week alone I've not quite bought flights to Turkey, Croatia, |
| 1:06.4 | Glasgow, Greece and New Zealand. I'm not alone in having my flying habits curtailed. |
| 1:13.0 | Around the world, people have had business trips, family celebrations and holidays cancelled |
| 1:18.0 | as the COVID pandemic lockdown cut air traffic by about two-thirds. For me that means mainly disappointment, |
| 1:26.4 | but some people relished the new quieter skies. That silence was recorded in the back garden of listener Uran Vine, who lives next door to the normally very busy Skippole Airport, which serves Amsterdam in the Netherlands. |
| 1:48.0 | So what happens during the lockdown? |
| 1:50.0 | Well, the first two months, it was really quiet, so quiet that they closed one of the runways and used it as a parking lot for planes. |
| 1:58.0 | No way. And when you're out in your garden, how many planes do you normally have going overhead? |
| 2:06.0 | Or do you not even notice it anymore? |
| 2:09.0 | Well, we do notice it. It would be as much as one plane every 40 or 50 seconds. |
| 2:14.0 | And your question for crowd science, what did you want to know? |
| 2:18.0 | Well, I noticed that when the plane stopped flying, |
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