Abstract
Abstract. The OpenSky Network is a non-profit association that crowdsources the global collection of live air traffic control data broadcast by aircraft and makes them available to researchers. OpenSky's data have been used by over 100 academic groups in the past 5 years, with popular research applications ranging from improved weather forecasting to climate analysis. With the COVID-19 outbreak, the demand for live and historic aircraft flight data has surged. Researchers around the world use air traffic data to comprehend the spread of the pandemic and analyse the effects of the global containment measures on economies, climate and other systems. With this work, we present a comprehensive air traffic dataset, derived and enriched from the full OpenSky data and made publicly available for the first time (Olive et al., 2020; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3931948, last access: 9 February 2021). It spans all flights seen by the network's more than 3500 members between 1 January 2019 and 1 July 2020. The archive is being updated every month and for the first 18 months includes 41 900 660 flights, from 160 737 aircraft, which were seen to frequent 13 934 airports in 127 countries.
Highlights
We present a dataset of global flight movements derived from crowdsourced air traffic control data collected by the OpenSky Network (Schäfer et al, 2014), which are widely used in many fields, including several areas pertaining to Earth system sciences
software-defined radios (SDRs) devices present a significant change to traditional radios, in that wireless technologies can be implemented as separate pieces of software and run on the same hardware
With the explosive growth of global civil aviation, more accurate cooperative radar technologies have been deployed to ensure safety and efficiency of the airspace. For this dataset of flight movements, we use the data broadcast by aircraft with the modern Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) protocol
Summary
We present a dataset of global flight movements derived from crowdsourced air traffic control data collected by the OpenSky Network (Schäfer et al, 2014), which are widely used in many fields, including several areas pertaining to Earth system sciences. The second main category comprises the analysis of the socio-ecological impact of COVID-19 and measures implemented to fight it It uses flights for example as an indicator of economic activity (at a given airport or region or globally) as illustrated in Miller et al (2020). Lecocq et al (2020) employed OpenSky data recently in order to analyse the impact of COVID-19 mitigation measures on high-frequency seismic noise and we have received several requests relating to research on the impact of COVID-19
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