Aviation Hazard at Tokyo Narita Airport, Japan, on January 13, 2026: Strong Low‐Level Windshear and Turbulence

An uncommon event of gusting winds occurred on January 13, 2026 at Narita airport in Tokyo, Japan, leading to diversions of a number of landing aircraft. This paper attempts to document this event. Emphasis is placed on analyzing available flight recorder data to evaluate the wind’s impact on aircraft landing. The observation and forecasting of the blowing dust reported are briefly described for the sake of completeness. It is found that significant low‐level windshear, significant crosswind changes and severe turbulence occurred during the approach of the aircraft, increasing the workload of pilots. The wind fluctuations are simulated using a high‐resolution mesoscale meteorological model. The simulation is found to give reasonable reproduction of the headwind and crosswind changes as well as the significant turbulence, thus opening up the possibility of forecasting such aviation hazards and providing earlier alerts of these phenomena for flight planning purpose. The simulation is more successful with the use of more updated land use land cover (LULC) data, which suggests that, in addition to the synoptic to mesoscale meteorological features, the surface roughness plays a significant role in the occurrence of the wind changes as well as the severe turbulence. However, the simulation still does not fully reproduce the fluctuations of headwinds and crosswinds as observed from aircraft data, and the coupling of a mesoscale meteorological model with a computational fluid dynamics model may be necessary in order to achieve complete diagnosis of the event.