Exploring Spatial Patterns of Flight Turbulence Incidents in China with QAR data

In this study, we utilized the Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data collected from Chinese civil aviation industry to extract flight turbulences that occurred in China in 2016. We then and adopted the KDE technique to preliminarily analyze its spatial distribution. Despite this, Voronoi polygons are produced based on the airport locations. With the representative excisions, the frequency and density of flight turbulence incidents are calculated and explored in a different view. At the same time, we used both global and local spatial autocorrelation to explore the spatial aggregation characteristics of flight turbulences’ density. Results show that flight turbulence incidents in 2016 mostly occurred in eastern-coastal and central-western areas. On the one hand, busy airports with large flight flows tend to be spots with high frequency flight turbulence incidents; on the other hand, complex topographic or meteorological conditions could be some other incentives for intensive flight turbulence incidents.