Abstract

Thunderstorms have a substantial impact on airport performance and, if the airport capacity is limited, can cause operations to be delayed. This study is a statistical analysis of data collected by meteorological stations at Myanmar's YANGON international airports (VYYY) during Thunderstorm days. It spans eleven years, from January 2009 to December 2019. From 2009 to 2019, we have 119874 thirty-minute (xx20, and xx50) Aviation Routine Weather Reports from YANGON International Airport. (METARs).We found 20219 instances of weather phenomena, including 1237 Thunderstorm occurrences, within these records. During Thunderstorms (TS) or Thunderstorm Rain (TSRA), visibility will average 3500 meters with 6.67 percent frequency from 2009 to 2019. Most TSRA occurrences at Yangon international airport may occur between 15:00 and 16:30 in the afternoons on particular TSRA days. 00:00 UTC to 04:00 UTC is the time zone for aircraft. The worst weather phenomena at VYYY are raining during airplane approach due to poor visibility and a strong gust wind. However, the majority of them are caused by thunderstorms. As a result, we may assume that poor visibility, a low ceiling, and thunderstorms and fog are the worst weather conditions for Yangon International Airport. Visibility, cloud ceiling, and thunderstorm or fog conditions are also critical for airport and airplane operations. The highest frequency of thunderstorms happened in July, and the lowest frequency occurred in January. CAPE and K-Index, over the airport region, also increasing year by year. TSRA or convective activities occurrences over airport region are positive correlation with the BoB SST and negative correlation with the Nino region SST over Pacific. After tested the correlation between BoB SST, convective rainfall over airport region, and CAPE Index, we found both CAPE index and convective rainfall over airport region are highly correlated with BoB SST. Thus, BoB SST is the one dominant factor for TSRA occurrence increasing at Yangon International Airport region and further factors may need to study. As noted by a well-known physicist in another context, the current finding poses a new question, as well as a fresh opportunity to look at climatology from a different perspective, and to make significant progress in the predictability study

Keywords: Airport performance; Weather impact; METAR; Thunderstorm; BoB SST