Using Data Cubes to Investigate Links Between Lightning and Civil Aviation

Lightning is a hazard for many sectors and industries, including the power utility sector, wind turbines, forest management, and civil aviation.  Commercial aircraft are struck by lightning approximately once every year, but most airlines try to avoid thunderstorms if possible by rerouting around these turbulent and electrified storms.  However, such diversions can delay flights, add costs to fuel demands, while increasing greenhouse gas emissions for the aircraft company.  In this study using data cubes we have combined lightning data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) together with civil aviation flight data from FlightRadar24 to better understand the risks of lightning to civil aviation.  Combining historic lightning and aviation data we can address questions about risks to aircraft from thunderstorms, the frequency of close encounters with thunderstorms, and the frequency of rerouted flights due to thunderstorm activities.  The emerging concept of Analysis-Ready Data (ARD) attempts to find concepts and methods towards services operating on homogenized data. For spatio-temporal data, datacubes are an accepted cornerstone for ARD providing Big Geo Data easier for users and applications, ready for analysis, visualization, fusion, etc. As part of the Cube4EnvSec NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS) project we will present live demos of our data cube tools and services related to lightning risks for civil aviation over Europe.  Derived analytics from the datacube will also be presented.