Abstract
Abstract. Aviation contributes to climate change, and the climate impact of aviation is expected to increase further. Adaptations of aircraft routings in order to reduce the climate impact are an important climate change mitigation measure. The air traffic simulator AirTraf, as a submodel of the European Center HAMburg general circulation model (ECHAM) and Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC) model, enables the evaluation of such measures. For the first version of the submodel AirTraf, we concentrated on the general setup of the model, including departure and arrival, performance and emissions, and technical aspects such as the parallelization of the aircraft trajectory calculation with only a limited set of optimization possibilities (time and distance). Here, in the second version of AirTraf, we focus on enlarging the objective functions by seven new options to enable assessing operational improvements in many more aspects including economic costs, contrail occurrence, and climate impact. We verify that the AirTraf setup, e.g., in terms of number and choice of design variables for the genetic algorithm, allows us to find solutions even with highly structured fields such as contrail occurrence. This is shown by example simulations of the new routing options, including around 100 North Atlantic flights of an Airbus A330 aircraft for a typical winter day. The results clearly show that AirTraf 2.0 can find the different families of optimum flight trajectories (three-dimensional) for specific routing options; those trajectories minimize the corresponding objective functions successfully. The minimum cost option lies between the minimum time and the minimum fuel options. Thus, aircraft operating costs are minimized by taking the best compromise between flight time and fuel use. The aircraft routings for contrail avoidance and minimum climate impact reduce the potential climate impact which is estimated by using algorithmic climate change functions, whereas these two routings increase the aircraft operating costs. A trade-off between the aircraft operating costs and the climate impact is confirmed. The simulation results are compared with literature data, and the consistency of the submodel AirTraf 2.0 is verified.
Highlights
Climate impact due to aviation emissions is an important issue
Another aspect to be emphasized compared to other models is that AirTraf performs air traffic simulations not under International Standard Atmospheric (ISA) conditions and not under a fixed atmospheric condition for a specific day but under comprehensive atmospheric conditions which are calculated by EMAC; that is to say that AirTraf can simulate air traffic for long-term periods in EMAC, which enables one to examine effects of aircraft routing strategies on climate impact on a long-term timescale
We introduced updates to the air traffic simulation model AirTraf in the chemistry–climate model EMAC
Summary
Climate impact due to aviation emissions is an important issue. Nowadays global aviation contributes only about 5 % to the anthropogenic climate impact (Skeie et al, 2009; Lee et al, 2009, 2010). In AirTraf 2.0, seven new aircraft routing options have been introduced: fuel use, NOx emissions, H2O emissions, contrail formation, simple operating cost (SOC), cash operating cost (COC), and climate impact estimated by the algorithmic climate change functions (aCCFs) (Van Manen, 2017; Yin et al, 2018b, 2020; Van Manen and Grewe, 2019). One or two specific routing options are available for a flight trajectory optimization in other models Another aspect to be emphasized compared to other models is that AirTraf performs air traffic simulations not under International Standard Atmospheric (ISA) conditions and not under a fixed atmospheric condition for a specific day but under comprehensive atmospheric conditions which are calculated by EMAC; that is to say that AirTraf can simulate air traffic for long-term periods in EMAC, which enables one to examine effects of aircraft routing strategies on climate impact on a long-term timescale.
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