Every flight I go on I check Turbli before I do it to check out how much turbulence there will be (nervous flyer). Almost every single time I have checked it, it ends up being absurdly accurate. Then today when I was on a flight the pilot said that for the next 4 minutes there will be severe turbulence but after it should be smooth sailing. I looked at the clock and he was exactly right. How did he know? What instruments show this and how do they work?
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They (typically) use the NOAA forecasts (some other countries have their own models). I don’t know if the exact details of these forecasts are public, but there are most likely a few various things that NOAA factor in.
Turbulence is a complicated subject, and we can’t realistically do a perfect calculation (we can’t know the exact number of particles and their initial conditions to start with, and even if we could it would take a ridiculous amount of computing to do everything perfectly). We instead have various equations which can be shown to give good approximations for various different regimes (eg high altitude, low altitude).
The NOAA would combine all of their empirical data from various sources and throw it into their models which will use a variety of different calculations. Over time they improve on this by comparing their forecasts to what actually happened and tweaking their models.
Aircraft will communicate with control to update control on the weather, so if there is any turbulence that wasn’t forecast then this can be passed on to other aircraft.
See the Wikipedia pages on turbulence, Reynolds number, Richardson number, and Frontogenesis as examples of some of the maths that may be used in the models.
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