Risk Assessment for a Global Air Transport System Using Socioeconomic-Technological-Environmental Databases

This article assesses the risks posed by tsunamis to the global air transport system by estimating several associated parameters from socioeconomic-technological-environmental databases. Considering the risk of tsunami run-up events to exposed air transportation, we estimated the physical exposure of airports utilized in global aviation networks. We linked OAG timetable data on international passenger flights, geographical information on airports, NOAA tsunami-event catalog data, and NOAA global Earth-surface data per 1-minute degree-grid square. In order to extrapolate the frequency of severe tsunami run-up events, we assumed a generalized Pareto distribution and estimated its parameters from historical records on tsunamis spanning 1,000 years by using either the maximum likelihood method or the probability-weighted moments-matching method. We believe that this is the first time has assessed tsunami run-up risk to a global air transport system by exhaustively collecting relevant Big Data.