Economic Value of Meteorological Services to Switzerland's Airlines: The Case of TAF at Zurich Airport

Just as in other state-subsidized service areas, in the field of aviation weather there is political pressure as well as a growing economic need to substantiate or at least evaluate the economic benefits of meteorological information. The research presented in this paper has been conducted as part of a broad study concerning the economic benefits of the meteorological services in the Swiss transport sector. For the aviation sector, interviews revealed that meteorological information is a pivotal input factor in the decision-making process of airlines: In addition to security and safety purposes, airlines use meteorological information to optimize the economic efficiency of daily operations as well as for strategic decisions regarding flight routes and flight planning. In this paper a decision-making model is used to evaluate at least part of the economic benefits of the meteorological services to Switzerland's domestic airlines by analyzing the use of terminal aerodrome forecasts (TAF) at Zurich Airport (Switzerland). By lowering the probability of costly wrong decisions, meteorological information generates direct economic benefits for the airlines. The total benefits for all domestic airlines at Zurich Airport amount to between 11 and 17 million Swiss francs per year [12 to 18 million USD; 1 U.S. dollars (USD) = 0.934 Swiss francs (CHF), average exchange rate 2012]. By extrapolating the results based on the number of flights, the total economic benefits of TAF to Switzerland's domestic airlines at both main Swiss airports (Zurich and Geneva) add up to somewhere between 13 and 21 million Swiss francs per year (14 to 22 million USD).