Abstract
Air traffic contributes to anthropogenic global warming by about 5% due to CO2 emissions and non-CO2 effects, which are primarily caused by the emission of NOx and water vapor as well as the formation of contrails. Since—in the long term—the aviation industry is expected to maintain its trend to grow, mitigation measures are required to counteract its negative effects upon the environment. One of the promising operational mitigation measures that has been a subject of the EU project ATM4E is climate-optimized flight planning by considering algorithmic climate change functions that allow for the quantification of aviation-induced climate impact based on the emission’s location and time. Here, we describe the methodology developed for the use of algorithmic climate change functions in trajectory optimization and present the results of its application to the planning of about 13,000 intra-European flights on one specific day with strong contrail formation over Europe. The optimization problem is formulated as bi-objective continuous optimal control problem with climate impact and fuel burn being the two objectives. Results on an individual flight basis indicate that there are three major classes of different routes that are characterized by different shapes of the corresponding Pareto fronts representing the relationship between climate impact reduction and fuel burn increase. On average, for the investigated weather situation and traffic scenario, a climate impact reduction in the order of 50% can be achieved by accepting 0.75% of additional fuel burn. Higher mitigation gains would only be available at much higher fuel penalties, e.g., a climate impact reduction of 76% associated with a fuel penalty of 12.8%. However, these solutions represent much less efficient climate impact mitigation options.
Highlights
Global air traffic has been growing over the past decades and was able to withstand a number of global crises despite temporary declines in flight movements
As the case study day, 18 December 2015 has been selected, since this day is characterized by a high traffic volume with unaffected traffic flows indicated by a low number of weather, Air Traffic Control (ATC), and aerodrome related regulations
Meteorological parameters, which are required for both the aircraft performance calculations as well as the algorithmic climate change functions (aCCFs) evaluation are determined based on European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim reanalysis data [25]
Summary
Global air traffic has been growing over the past decades and was able to withstand a number of global crises despite temporary declines in flight movements. Apart from CO2 emissions, air traffic is responsible for non-CO2 effects, due to the emission of nitrogen oxides and water vapor as well as the formation of contrails, which change the concentration of radiative forcing agents in the atmosphere and have an impact on the climate. Aviation’s contribution to anthropogenic climate change is estimated to be about 5%, of which approximately two-thirds can be attributed to the non-CO2 effects [1]. Mitigation actions have to be introduced as soon as possible considering both CO2 and non-CO2 effects together. The latter ones are strongly dependent on the geographic location, altitude, time of the day, and the current atmospheric background conditions. The avoidance of climate-sensitive regions, which are characterized by a high share of non-CO2 emissions on the climate impact, is considered to be a promising means
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