WHAT CAN WE DO WITH DATA?

This video was produced for the spanish version of the competition "your thesis in 3 minutes" (http://atica.lsi.upc.edu/t3m/) and explains what my PhD research is about. English subtitles are available on vimeo.

During my PhD, I've been processing different types of data. Environmental simulation results were produced with Marenostrum supercomputer using the Fall3D model, while air traffic data were gathered from Eurocontrol database. Merging these data and using geospatial analysis allowed drawing some conclusions for European airspace and put the basis for a better risk management in future.

In collaboration with the universities of Geneva, Naples Reykjavik, I performed a vulnerability assessment of European air traffic network based on air traffic statistics (Eurostat). The analysis has been performed for airports, routes and flight information regions in Europe (Scaini et al., 2014a). This is an example of vulnerability of routes connecting Keflavik airport (Iceland) to his main commercial partners in Europe. The vulnerability rating is based on the average amount of passengers (left) and freight (right) displaced onver the route.

Hazard and vulnerability information can be merged (overlapped) to assess expected impacts on exposed features. This is an example of expected impact maps for European flight information regions in case of eruption of 4 active Icelandic volcanoes (Scaini et al., 2014a). These maps are qualitative and are not associated to a probability of occurrence. However, their comparison allows identifying areas that are expected to suffer the higher damage in case of occurrence of a specific eruptive event.

Also, in collaboration with Trieste university, weo designed a GIS-based tool that allows assessing expected impact of a given eruption on intra-European air traffic (Scaini et al., 2014b). We used real air traffic data (from the Eurocontrol air traffic database) and performed the impact assessment at hourly time steps. Results are produced in different formats: tables, plots and maps. This is an example of Google Earth maps showing impacted airports, routes and airspace sectors (left to right, respectively).

example of impacts of volcanic ash in Europe

These works show how merging different informations allows identifying patterns and significative relations between elements and phenomena, increasing the knowledge of our world and eventually reducing our vulnerability in case of hazardous events.