ClimOP Project - Climate assessment of innovative mitigation strategies towards operational improvements in aviation

Abstract

Air Transport has for a long time been linked to environmental issues like pollution, noise and climate change. The share of aviation amongst all anthropogenic emissions is about 3-5%. Considering the projected growth of air traffic for the next decades, aviations share of the total anthropogenic climate impact is expected to increase further. While CO2 emissions are the main focus in public discussions, non-CO2 emissions of aviation may have a similar impact on the climate as aviation's carbon dioxide, e.g. contrail cirrus, nitrogen oxides or aviation induced cloudiness. These non-CO2 effects are highly variable in their occurrence, with a strong spatially and temporally variation, while acting on short- and long-term atmospheric time horizons. Reducing these non-CO2 effects can be exploited to significantly reduce the overall climate impact of aviation by avoiding regions with high climate sensitivity. The ClimOP project, funded by the Horizon2020 programme, investigates which operational improvements do have a positive impact on climate, taking non-CO2 effects into account. Subsequently, the project will analyses and will propose harmonized mitigation strategies that foster the implementation of these operational improvements. Some of these operational improvements include optimization of flight network operations, climate-optimized flight planning or upgrades to the airport infrastructure. The final goal of ClimOP is to provide recommendations to steer the decision and policymaking in the European Union (EU) Aviation sector. To reach this goal, ClimOP employs a six-step methodology that focuses on stakeholders needs by using an iterative validation process. To this end, the ClimOp consortium builds on its knowledge and expertise covering the whole spectrum from aviation operations research as well as atmospheric science and consulting to airline and airport operations. The research work presented here focusing on further developments of methods used for identifying climate optimized flight trajectories. We investigate what physical processes are responsible for the climate impact of contrails, their spatial and temporal variation and explore how can such information be efficiently made available for operational climate mitigation options and trajectory optimizations. In order to study the physical processes resulting in the climate impact of contrails we use the global Earth System model system called Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) and the Earth-system model EMAC, which contains various submodels. This model is employed to calculate the atmospheric impact of standardized air traffic emissions at predefined latitudes, longitudes, altitudes and times. In this framework, numerical simulation on Lagrangian trajectory transportation are performed.