Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Brown, Michael E.

Committee Member

Mercer, Andrew E.

Committee Member

Dyer, Jamie L.

Date of Degree

5-12-2023

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Geosciences

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Geosciences

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate weather-related flight delay trends at 13 United States airports. Flight delay data were collected from 2004-2019 and normalized by airport operations data. Using Support Vector Regression (SVR), visual trends were identified. Further analysis was conducted by comparing all four meteorological seasons through computing 95% bootstrap confidence intervals on their means. Finally, precipitation and snowfall data were correlated with normalized delays to investigate how they are related. This study found that the season with the highest normalized delay values is heavily dependent upon location. Most airports saw a decrease in the SVR line at some point since 2004, but have since leveled off. It was also discovered that while precipitation trends are not changing drastically, delay variability has decreased at many airports in the last 10 years, which may be indicative of more effective mitigation strategies.

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