Influence of a volcanic eruption on a flight route: The case of the 2020 Taal eruption in the Philippines

Abstract

Abstract This study uses the case study of the 2020 Taal volcano eruption in the Philippines to analyze the influence of a large volcanic eruption on flight routing, by applying trajectory clustering technology and proposing ways to avoid accidents and system malfunctioning risks caused by the volcanic ash. We adopt the hierarchical density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (HDBSCAN) algorithm to classify the trajectories. Additionally, we use the Fréchet distance to measure the distance among trajectories of the same flight. We downloaded the observation data, recorded from January 1, 2020 to January 31, 2020, from Flightradar24 as well as the information of the diffusion of the volcanic ash from Tokyo Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC). Through the case study, we found that (i) the airlines either cancel or reroute flights that fly through or near a heavily ash-contaminated area within 24 h; (ii) after 24 h, airlines have two options for flights that depart within a couple of hours: “keeping the special operation” or “getting back to the regular” in the case of the 2020 Taal volcano.