The Conditionality of Outdoor Sports Events on Weather-Induced Impacts and Possible Solution

• Published in: Journal of hospitality & tourism research (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 45; no. 7; pp. 1303 - 1323
• Main Authors: Petrović, Marko D., Radovanović, Milan M., Vyklyuk, Yaroslav, Milenković, Milan, Tretiakova, Tatiana N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2021; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Professional baseball; Tourism; natural hazards; sports event; MLB games; recurrent neural network; weather risk
• ISSN: 1096-3480; 1557-7554
• DOI: 10.1177/1096348020971028

All over the globe, outdoor sports events are highly affected by weather conditions that frequently influence the comfort of the players and sports fans, the duration, or even the cancelation of the event. To verify the range of weather-induced impacts on selected Major League Baseball events, this interdisciplinary study investigated the causes of unexpected postponements of several Major League Baseball games in March and April 2018, according to official weather reports in the event host destinations. The impact was measured by a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory as an investigation model. Autocorrelation analysis was conducted between all input and target fields. The research focused on the explanation of the influence of weather risks on the event host destinations. Moreover, the study is based on projecting an effective instrument for managing weather risks and then evaluating the tourism services that the future climatic conditions will support. The long short-term memory analysis revealed that solar activity had the greatest influence on the temperature. On the other hand, humidity and air pressure depended very little on solar activity; this finding was confirmed by the zero values of the sensitivity. These values encourage further research on weather disturbances and their connections with outdoor sports and tourism activities.