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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").
Figure 1 : Forward area of a severe cumulonimbus moving to the west.This area is precipitation-free and the site of widespread updrafts. The updrafts under a cumulonimbus can be extremely laminar, extensive, and uniform, this is particularly true during the buildup of the thunderstorm. [8]
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.”
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 rear flank downdraft can arise owing to negative buoyancy, which can be generated by cold anomalies produced at the rear of the supercell thunderstorm by evaporative cooling of precipitation or hail melting, or injection of dry and cooler air in the cloud, and by vertical perturbation pressure gradients that can arise from vertical gradients of vertical vorticity, stagnation of ...
For tornadoes to form, we need thunderstorms, which have very strong updrafts and downdrafts, said Bill Gallus, a professor in the department of Geological and atmospheric sciences at Iowa State ...
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.