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Updrafts and downdrafts, along with wind shear in general, are a major contributor to airplane crashes during takeoff and landing in a thunderstorm. Extreme cases, known as downbursts and microbursts, can be deadly and difficult to predict or observe.
Supercell storms are large, usually severe, quasi-steady-state storms that form in an environment where wind speed or wind direction varies with height ("wind shear"), and they have separate downdrafts and updrafts (i.e., where its associated precipitation is not falling through the updraft) with a strong, rotating updraft (a "mesocyclone").
The updrafts and downdrafts within cumulonimbus clouds cause water molecules to freeze and solidify, creating hailstones and other forms of solid precipitation. [60] Due to their larger density, these hailstones become heavy enough to overcome the density of the cloud and fall towards the ground.
The resulting thunderstorms are “very dangerous” for air travel, Struckmann said. This is due to the “severe turbulence caused by updrafts, downdrafts, winds and hail.”
Rear-flank downdrafts have a well-established association with hook echoes. [3] [4] Firstly, the initial rear flank downdraft is air from aloft transported down to the surface by colliding and mixing with the storm. [2] Secondly, hook echoes form through advection of precipitation from the rear of the main echo around the region of strong ...
The formation of multicellular thunderstorms imply that the updraft in the mother thunderstorm is offset from its downdraft. New cells usually form in the upwind (usually western or southwestern) part of the storm where the downdrafts of the mature cells meet the environmental wind, lifting air parcels and triggering new convection.
The thunderstorm system can be divided into two zones in the figure to the left: the precipitation-free zone, located on the left where the airmass has a widespread up motion, and the precipitation zone, on the right where the airmass is sinking. At the point where the two zones meet, there is a wall cloud that could initiate tornadoes ...
A squall line is an organized line of thunderstorms. It is classified as a multi-cell cluster, meaning a thunderstorm complex comprising many individual updrafts. They are also called multi-cell lines. Squalls are sometimes associated with hurricanes or other cyclones, but they can also occur independently.