Given the expensive and protracted nature of airport improvement projects, they must be planned by using careful forecasting and reliable estimates of demand and capacity. The processes aimed at improving airports and satisfying the time and financial constraints constitute airport planning. In airport planning, when considering the limitations of an airport and potential improvements, one needs also to consider daily capacity variations attributable to local weather and how they compare with the airport's demand profile. The current representation of capacity in the planning process does not capture this variation and dependence on local weather. A weather profile of a given day is defined as a series of weather conditions observed or predicted for every hour of that day. Weather profiles can be translated to a series of hourly capacity estimates by using analytical and empirical models. When the capacity estimates are combined with a representative demand profile, queuing delay can be estimated. In capturing the capacity variations at an airport, it is very resource intensive and impractical to represent every day by using its own weather profile in planning processes. It would be useful to find a few representative weather profiles from airport data that strike a balance between capturing weather variability and reducing the complexity of the planning process. The objective of this research is to develop a method for identifying representative weather profiles and demonstrate this method for selected airports in the United States. The results indicated that, for the three airports considered, fewer than 10 representative weather profiles were sufficient to yield accurate delay estimates.
Representative Weather Profiles in Airport Planning
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board ; 2603 , 1 ; 21-28
2017-01-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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