Investigation on the effects of weather patterns on strategic climate impact mitigation measures: a data-based approach

Kurzfassung

Aviation plays a crucial role in global transportation, but its environmental impact, particularly its contribution to climate change, remains a significant concern. Besides CO2-emissions from aircraft, recent research has highlighted the substantial impact of non-CO2 effects. These effects, encompassing various atmospheric phenomena, demonstrate a complex relationship with time, location of emission, and prevailing atmospheric conditions along aircraft trajectories. This research aims to develop a database of climate sensitivity to discern the factors influencing these aviation emission effects, thereby enabling the determination of operational measures on fleet level. The research focuses on key meteorological parameters and algorithmic climate change functions (aCCFs), considering a multitude of atmospheric phenomena, which are known to significantly influence climate impact of aviation [Castino et al, 2022]. By gathering extensive meteorological data from the European Centre for medium weather range forecast (ECMWF), and processing it by means of the CLIMaCCF library [Dietmüller et. al 2022] we can derive patterns and associations to identify areas particularly sensitive to non-CO2 emissions and their effects by applying algorithmic climate change functions that allow for a fast computation of aviation related temperature response to specific emission species. This data-driven approach allows us to understand the intricate interplay between aircraft emissions, atmospheric conditions, and the resulting climate forcing in terms of average temperature response (ATR). The development of this meteorological database provides a valuable resource for assessing the environmental implications of air traffic operations. This study is focused on enabling climate mitigation through operational changes on a large traffic scenario compared to previous studies [Lührs et al 2021] to derive relevant strategic mitigation measures in ATM. This data-based approach is a conceptual study to identify the potential of using aCCFs for the determination of strategic measures in flight planning to mitigate climate impact focused on the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC).