Eco2Fly - Towards an aviation climate impact assessment

Abstract

Air traffic facilitates our society’s requirements for mobility. However, air traffic also contributes to climate change. Especially in view of the 2°C-climate target, it is important to make aviation eco-efficient. Here, the project Eco2Fly aims at revising the estimate of the climate impact of aviation, by means of numerical simulations as well as in-situ and remote sensing measurements. Eco2Fly is a DLR funded project, which focuses on the climate impact of aviation, how atmospheric processes can be better understood and how we can reduce the climate impact of aviation. Therefore, the Eco2Fly project has three main goals which are an aviation climate impact assessment, an improved understanding of the impact of soot effects and contrails and a climate mitigation assessment of different operational and technological measures. In this poster we focus on the first goal, the aviation climate impact assessment. Lee et al. (2021) published a comprehensive climate impact assessment last year, which gives an excellent overview of the different climate species and their contribution to nowadays climate impact. Here, we like to add some new methods and processes to a climate impact assessment. One point is the difference between perturbation und tagging approach. While the perturbation approach provides the impact of changed emissions in the chemistry-climate system, the tagging approach gives the contribution of one sector to the total climate impact. Additionally, new insights from numerical simulations for the direct and indirect aerosol impact were obtained. It is important for such a climate impact assessment, to use model results which are based on a realistic spatial distribution of emissions as different emission inventories can cause significantly different climate impact estimates, despite unchanged total emissions. In cooperation with the DLR project TraK (Transport and Climate) emission calculation and climate modelling approaches are applied to assess the climate impacts of the 2019 aviation emissions. We will give an overview on the different aspects we focus on in Eco2Fly, while presenting numerical models and emission inventories used for this set of comprehensive simulations.