The vulnerability of the European air traffic network to spatial hazards

Sean Wilkinson (), Sarah Dunn and Shu Ma

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2012, vol. 60, issue 3, 1027-1036

Abstract: The 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano had a devastating effect on the European air traffic network, preventing air travel throughout most of Europe for 6 days (Oroian in ProEnvironment 3:5–8, 2010 ). The severity of the disruption was surprising as previous research suggests that this type of network should be tolerant to random hazard (Albert et al. in Nature 406(6794):378–382, 2000 ; Strogatz in Nature 410(6825):268–276, 2001 ). The source of this hazard tolerance lies in the degree distribution of the network which, for many real-world networks, has been shown to follow a power law (Albert et al. in Nature 401(6749):130–131, 1999 ; Albert et al. in Nature 406(6794):378–382, 2000 ). In this paper, we demonstrate that the ash cloud was unexpectedly disruptive because it was spatially coherent rather than uniformly random. We analyse the spatial dependence in air traffic networks and demonstrate how the combination of their geographical distribution and their network architectures jeopardises their inherent hazard tolerance. Copyright The Author(s) 2012

Keywords: Network reliability; Scale-free networks; Spatial hazard; Airline networks; Hazard tolerance; Exponential networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-011-9885-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:60:y:2012:i:3:p:1027-1036

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-011-9885-6

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().