I tried Google, they didn’t give me a clear enough answer. So someone please explain it
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Air pressure is not uniform.
There might be a pocket of very dense air on one wing, and very thin air on the other.
This makes the plane engines more or less effective, and the wings get more or less lift. Making the plane lean, rise/drop or shake a little bit.
Usually a plane can handle this very smoothly, but ‘turbulence’ is when there is a lot of very sharp changes in air pressure.
Typically caused by wind changing direction or an area where there are 2 conflicting streams of wind, that the plane travels through.
When there’s wind, air is moving in one direction. When there’s turbulence, air is moving in different directions, usually in big and small swirls. It often happens when wind encounters objects, or other winds moving in different directions or at different speeds.
I skydive, and we’re wary of turbulence close to the ground, as it can mess up our landings and even hurt us. On a windy day, the leeward side of trees and buildings may have turbulence. On hot still days, roofs and asphalt may have turbulence from thermals. Airplanes and other parachutes have turbulence behind them. Dust devils have turbulence that can stretch much farther up than the visible dust. Cumulus clouds can also have turbulence inside and near them, because they’re blobs of rising air, but they’re normally at safe altitudes. I’ve ridden a plane above a particularly tall cumulus cloud, and it was like riding on a really rough gravel road. Falling down the side of the mountainous cloud was epic though.
Air or water or any other fluid can flow smoothly sometimes. You can turn on a faucet a little bit and the water will stabilize into a steady stream. It might even look like it isn’t moving, even though it is. This is sometimes called “laminar” flow, and it is the opposite of turbulent flow.
Sometimes the flow is not so smooth. When the water(or air) goes too fast(or bumps into some other air going in a different direction), some of it stops going straight and makes little swirls, which make other little swirls, and and the whole thing becomes a chaotic mess. The fluid is still moving, but it wastes a lot of energy making chaotic little swirls. Additionally, if you’re an airplane or something that relies on air, those swirls going in different directions can be very bumpy.
Turbulence is a term used in fluid mechanics, which as a science is branched under Physics. Fluid mechanics describes the flow of fluids – liquids and gases, including air and water. If you take water as an example, by adding coloured dye to the water, it is possible to see that some parts flow predictably, and some more chaotically. The more chaotic part is termed turbulence.
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