Monitoring fog at IGI Airport and analysis of its runway-wise spatio-temporal variations using Meso-RVR network

摘要

Fog affects aviation severely at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport. With nearly 700 flights operating daily, it requires efficient coordination among various stakeholders for mitigating the effect of fog. The Meteorological Watch Office (MWO) at the IGI Airport aims at providing best fog monitoring and forecasting solution through an integrated system by adopting innovative methods. In the present article, we briefly outline the fog monitoring, forecasting and dissemination system implemented by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) at the IGI Airport for providing weather service to all the three runways at the airport. In view of the following winter of 2008-2009 experienced very high duration of 147 h of CAT-III dense fog, attempts have been made to find their unique characteristics based on various visibility ranges by analysing hourly general visibility data of the season of 2008-2009 and similar data since 1981. Fog occurrence being a highly meso-scale event, another objective was to find runway-wise spatio-temporal variations of these fog characteristics, at various runway visual ranges (RVRs), using data from a very high resolution network of seven RVR instruments installed at these three runways.