Alaska aviation weather infrastructure: outage patterns and strategic prioritization

Abstract

Alaska is the most aviation dependent state in the United States of America, with almost a quarter of the population and the majority of named communities lying off of the limited road system. The importance of reliable aviation transportation, and the infrastructure underlying these networks, is paramount for these communities. However, the vast distances, remoteness, and rugged environments that make aviation so critical also make maintaining aviation infrastructure particularly challenging. The goal of this report is to serve as a reference document for mapping outages in a subset of core aviation infrastructure – aviation weather stations. We have gathered what we believe is a complete outage history of the 151 “Automated Weather Observation Stations” (AWOS) and “Automated Surface Observation Stations” (ASOS) units in the state from primary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) outage records over the period of January 2019 to November 2023. We map these outages over space and time and link them to the key hub-and-spoke aviation supply chain networks in the state (e.g. USPS Bypass Mail). By linking infrastructure performance to the populations of communities served, we underscore the protracted impact of AWOS and ASOS outages on Alaska’s remote and predominantly Native populations in off-road communities. This analysis should help policymakers in this critical period of investment prioritization, following injections of capital investment funding from the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative (DYAASI) within the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Bill. We conclude by outlining key ongoing extensions of this analysis, with direct hypotheses to be tested.