Evaluation of time-dependent aircraft trajectories with respect to climate impact

Kurzfassung

Aviation provides an efficient way to travel long distances in a relatively short time. However, the environmental impact of air travel cannot be neglected: the aviation sector contributes about 2.5% to the global overall anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and is responsible for about 5% of the temperature changes. As well as CO2 emissions that are directly related to fuel consumption, other non-CO2 effects play a significant role in the climate impact of aviation. The non-CO2 effects include e.g. nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, which cause changes in methane and ozone concentrations in the atmosphere, water vapour emissions as well as the formation of contrails. Unlike CO2 effects, non-CO2 effects are highly dependent on meteorological conditions, altitude and geographical location. At the Institute of Flight Guidance at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), future traffic scenarios are developed in order to investigate and evaluate the feasibility of various operational or technical adaptations. A tool implemented for this task is the Future Air Traffic Simulator (FATS). The goal of this thesis is to enable FATS to assess the non-CO2 climate impact along trajectories depending on (forecast) meteorological conditions. This assessment on a single trajectory level paves the way for a trajectory optimisation with regard to the climate impact. Within this work the most relevant aviation emissions as well as common approaches to assess the climate impact of non-CO2 emissions are reviewed. Based on the results found, the algorithmic Climate Change Functions (aCCF) are selected to implement in FATS. The aCCF provide a fast and efficient calculation of the climate impact of the non-CO2 effects ozone, methane, water vapour and contrail formation based on meteorological (forecast) data. The aCCF are implemented within the library CLIMaCCF. Based on this implementation, FATS is extended accordingly to calculate and visualise climate sensitive regions. Furthermore, FATS is extended to calculate the climate impact of non-CO2 effects along single trajectories. The results can then be exported in netCDF and CSV. Finally, a brief assessment of the requirements and the current applicability of climate optimisation in the air traffic management is given.