Sudden dropoff/increase in flights

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

I am capturing all enroute flight every 1.5 hours, and I noticed a sharp increase and decrease in traffic this morning, followed by yet another decrease before finally increasing this evening. Was this correct or is something wrong with my query?

For example between my 5:30AM (Central) capture and the one at 7:00AM, the number of flights recorded at each time was 493 and 1500, respectively. Then between 8:30 and 10:00AM Central the flight count dropped from 2279 to 202. From then on, the count remained around the 200’s, until dropping to around 80 at 4:00PM before rising back up to 2001 flights at 7PM.

My query filter is simply this, and is inside a loop that iterates through the offsets:
“-aboveAltitude 0”

I am capturing all available traffic, and I realize in hindsight that I probably don’t need the “-aboveAltitude 0” at all.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated!

2

Yeah there’s no way there were only 202 flights in those time ranges. You do this every day and this one day was off? Are you running it today and if so, what are you seeing?

3

I’m not currently capturing any data.

I only ran the queries for about 24 hours, from 2:15AM Central 3/2 through 2:30AM 3/3, with the intention of just getting all (or most) traffic within any 24-hour span. Honestly, my intention wasn’t to run it on an ongoing basis, though since the numbers are way off for so long, I probably will. I’m also considering reducing the time to 1 hour from 1.5 hours, and eliminating the search parameter.