Assessing the risk of windshear occurrence at HKIA using rare‐event logistic regression

Abstract

AbstractLow‐level windshear poses serious hazards to the flight safety of civil aircraft. The objective of the study was to assess the risk of windshear occurrence within 1 hr at runway corridors at Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). Windshear report records from HKIA and weather data around HKIA were obtained from Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) between January 2016 and December 2018. The rare‐event logistic regression was employed to evaluate windshear risk considering the imbalanced nature of the data. Several explanatory variables were found to be significantly correlated with the risk of the hourly occurrence of the windshear. Results indicated that at HKIA, March, April, July and August are associated with a higher likelihood of windshear events, while November suffered a significantly lower windshear risk. Besides, winds from the east, southeast, south and southwest are more likely to cause windshear events at HKIA. However, the study found that it was hard to predict windshear occurrence precisely only with the hourly weather variables due to the transient and sporadic nature of windshear. Therefore, more refined data are needed to improve the prediction performance of regression models for windshear occurrence. The present study is the first to analyse the windshear occurrence at airports using the rare‐event logistic regression method. Findings from the study can provide some references and valuable information for related researchers to understand low‐level windshear.