Long-Term Variations of Visibility and Implications for Flight Operations at Some Nigeria’s Airports

Long-term variations in visibility at Nigerian airports, particularly during the rainy season, significantly impact flight operations, leading to delays, cancellations, and diversions with extremely low visibility affecting aviation services that need accurate rainfall and low-visibility predictions for its operations. This study examined the factors, which contribute to the effects and consequences of visibility on 4 selected airports in Nigeria. The data used was provided by Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet). Specifically, they provided data on weather parameters of visibility, rainfall and air temperature for 30 years starting 1992 to 2023. The data were decomposed into dry (November, December, January, February, March) and rainy season (April, May, June, July, August, September, October). We employed month-wise mean to detrend data. This method is beneficial to first remove seasonal trend from all data. Also, we employed statistics to further characterize data. Results showed that Ilorin recorded a large increase in rainfall, a low air temperature and significantly low visibility mostly in August. We found that factors like fog, harmattan haze, thunderstorms, and rainfall contribute to these disruptions with a direct impact on flight safety and efficiency which should necessitate proactive weather risk assessments and management strategies.