Analysis of the wind coverage factor for airport runways computed with different probability distributions

Abstract

In airport planning, to determine runway orientation and to evaluate the need of an additional runway, it is very important to know the wind direction and its intensity over the time. During the planning stage, for airport site selection, the wind data could not be available. Only the annual average intensity of the wind for each direction is usually known. When this occurs, it is necessary to know the function of wind distribution or, if it is not available, to assume a function to model the wind distribution. In this work the fitness of the Rayleigh and Uniform distributions to wind data measured in a place, and its influence on the wind coverage factor are compared and analyzed.