Spatiotemporal visibility characteristics impacted by forest and land fire over airports in sumatera and borneo Island, Indonesia

Abstract

Smoke can reduce the airport’s visibility and is related to the aviation safety and efficiency. Low visibility has potential safety hazard, such GA-152 crashed in 1997, and thus there is a need to find out the visibility characteristics in airports over Sumatra and Borneo Island caused by 2015 forest fire. This research aims to analyse the spatiotemporal visibility characteristics over airports in Sumatera and Borneo Island using flight rule visibility below minima criteria and hazard probability. The analysis of smoke was characterized using visibility severity index (VSI) that is a function of visibility severity class and its probability level. Spatiotemporal analysis of severity index combined with hotspot and wind numerical weather model indicates that the worst impact visibility occurred in September and October 2015. The lowest visibility was occured over night until afternoon time period. The spread of VSI impact has a tendency to northward and northwestward. The very high VSI levels occurred at airports such: WIJJ (Jambi), WIBB (Pekanbaru), WAGG (Palangkaraya) which were impacted up to 70% of flight operations time with IFR visibility below minima; while the WIOS (Susilo-Sintang), which operates only on VFR, experienced about 92% of VFR visibility below minima at smoke climax period.

Fire Danger on Jambi Peatland Indonesia based on Weather Research and Forecasting Model

“…In 2015, for example, fires coincided with strong El-Nino have devastated 2.6 million ha peatland (World Bank, 2016). Peatland fires produced thick haze (Hayasaka and Sepriando, 2018;Hu et al, 2018;Yulianti et al, 2020), which caused health hazard (Sharma and Balasubramanian, 2018;Uda et al, 2019;Zaini et al, 2020) and disrupted both land and air transportation (Ismanto et al, 2019a(Ismanto et al, , 2019b, as well as economic loss for about USD 16 million (World Bank, 2016). To overcome the future risk of recurrent peat fires, Indonesian government established Peat Restoration Agency (now is BRGM) with a mandate to restore the degraded peatlands in Indonesia, including Jambi.…”