Limited meteorological monitoring networks provide insufficient information for determining the suitability of a specific location for an airport runway. These data limitations are compounded by the constraints imposed by the terrain itself. Clusters of small islands (archipelagos) generally lack dense meteorological monitoring networks, while the land–water distribution induces different meteorological regimes on neighbouring islands.

In this paper we present an integrated methodology to study the meteorological characteristics of potential runway sites on a medium-size island in the Aegean Sea in Greece. The methodology is based on studying the three scales of motion: (i) the synoptic scale, through a synoptic classification scheme, (ii) the mesoscale circulations with the aid of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model, and (iii) micro-scale characteristics of each potential runway site through in-situ inspections.