Zürich airport flights visualization

These visualizations were created as part of the Information Visualization course at ZHAW, taught by Dr. Susanne Bleisch. The project analyzes five years of Zurich Airport operations and weather measurements (2021–2025) to understand how seasonality, temperature, and operational intensity shape daily flight activity.

Results:

Initial time-series exploration showed a strong repeating wave pattern in daily arrivals and departures. This raised a central question:
Are these fluctuations random, or part of a systematic seasonal cycle? By combining daily plots, 7-day rolling averages, and week-of-year aggregations, a clear pattern emerged: flight volume and temperature rise and fall together across all years.

The first visualization below shows this relationship through an interactive animation tracing over 1,800 days of flight volume and temperature changes. It highlights the persistent correlation that appears across seasons and across years.

To understand operational intensity more clearly, I calculated flight intervals (operating minutes per day ÷ total flights). Aggregating by week-of-year (1–52) revealed a consistent 40% seasonal variation.

Weeks 35–45 show the shortest intervals (highest intensity), while weeks 1–10 show the longest (lowest intensity).

The radar chart below summarizes this annual cycle, combining weekly flight intervals with weather categories (☀️ 🌧️ ❄️) to highlight how operations and seasonality align.