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A study to improve the fog/visibility forecast at IGI Airport, New Delhi during the winter season 2020–2021

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Abstract

Fog and associated significant reduced visibility lead to flight cancellation, delay and diversion at IGI airport during the winter months every year. In the present study, a 24-hr and 48-hr fog/visibility forecast with value addition method has been implemented at IGI airport during the months of December and January, 2020–2021. The meteorological parameters information related to fog is obtained from IMD-GFS model outputs. A detailed forecast verification has also been carried out using the METAR and synoptic observations. Results indicated that the 24-hr fog/visibility forecast has promising skill score with a hit rate of 0.92 and Critical Success Index (CSI) of 0.68, whereas the false alarm ratio (0.28) is quite low. This indicates that the method has reasonable predictive accuracy and can be used for fog/visibility forecasting at regional scale. However, the 48-hr forecast scheme performance needs to be improved. In addition, detailed analysis has also been performed on various surface meteorological parameters such as wind speed and relative humidity during the period and the results were in agreement with the fog/visibility observations in most of the cases. In future, the current fog/visibility forecasting method would be further improved with increased robustness of the models used and also be objective.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Dr Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, Director General of Meteorology, India Meteorological Department for providing his encouragement and support to carry out the present study. The authors express their sincere gratitude to all Met officials at IGI airport, New Delhi for their enormous support throughout the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Meteorological Watch Office, India Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Indira Gandhi International Airport, Palam, New Delhi, 110 037, India

    S H Arun & Charan Singh

  2. Central Aviation Meteorological Division, India Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences, New Delhi, 110 003, India

    Sebin John, Sumant Kumar Diwakar, Dinesh Kumar Sankhala, Narendra Nigam, Chander S Tomar & Gajendra Kumar

Authors
  1. S H Arun
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  2. Charan Singh
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  3. Sebin John
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  4. Sumant Kumar Diwakar
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  5. Dinesh Kumar Sankhala
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  6. Narendra Nigam
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  7. Chander S Tomar
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  8. Gajendra Kumar
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Contributions

ASH: Conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation, visualization and writing original draft. CS: Conceptualization, formal analysis, supervision and writing – review and editing. SJ: Visualization and writing – review and editing. SKD: Software. DKS: Validation. NN, CST and GK: Supervision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to S H Arun.

Additional information

Communicated by Suresh Babu

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Arun, S.H., Singh, C., John, S. et al. A study to improve the fog/visibility forecast at IGI Airport, New Delhi during the winter season 2020–2021. J Earth Syst Sci 131, 124 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-01874-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-01874-5

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