Feeling the unseen: Clear air turbulence as a window into climate communication challenges

As climate change accelerates, its impacts reach unexpected domains—including the skies. Clear-air turbulence (CAT), an invisible and potentially increasing threat to aviation safety, illustrates a broader climate-era challenge: how societies perceive, communicate, and act on risks that cannot be directly observed. Using recent severe turbulence incidents—most notably Singapore Airlines SQ321 in May 2024—as a cautious entry point rather than evidence of direct event-level attribution, this article links anthropogenic warming to changing upper-atmospheric temperature gradients, jet-stream dynamics, and wind-shear conditions, reviews mounting observational evidence, and asks why robust science so rarely yields proportionate public awareness or institutional preparedness. Severe CAT has increased markedly over the past four decades—by roughly 55% in the North Atlantic—with climate models projecting substantial further increases under continued warming. Yet CAT remains marginal in climate discourse. Drawing on risk-perception research, science-communication theory, and aviation-safety studies, we argue that CAT's “invisibility problem” creates a core communication barrier: passengers face sudden, frightening episodes; scientists see long-term statistics; airlines prioritize operational continuity; and communicators must explain a probabilistic risk without overstating the role of climate change in any single incident. Synthesizing insights on psychological distance, risk perception, trust, uncertainty communication, and crisis communication, we explain this evidence–response gap and propose strategies to close it. We position CAT not only as an aviation issue but as a case study in climate communication: unseen yet consequential, increasingly measurable yet communicatively elusive.