GRIDcast: Efficient Modeling of Aviation Emissions for Future Markets and Technology Scenarios

Kurzfassung

In the context of global climate change, it is important to be able to predict the evolution of future emissions for estimating effects on climate change. The quantity and spatial distribution of future global aviation emissions are influenced by complex interactions of technology and operational improvement, traffic growth, and regional market dynamics. Because calculating global emission inventories is computationally intensive, surrogate models are needed to provide fast-access response surfaces for analyzing impacts of future climate actions across a full route network without running high-resolution models. GRIDcast is a fast, scalable, and adaptable tool to model global emissions based on user-defined scenarios. The tool's calculations are based on several input parameters and pre-calculated 3D emission inventories for the reference year 2023. These inventories include flight distances (required for contrail modeling) and CO2, NOx and H2O emissions, as well as additional details regarding flight phases and regions, the market segment (regional, single-aisle, twin-aisle) and the aircraft generation responsible for the emissions. Future air traffic emission inventories are computed based on user-specific heterogeneous growth scenarios for the Revenue Passenger Kilometres (RPK), pre-defined for established RPK forecasts from DLR and ICAO. Next-generation aircraft (NGA) of each market segment are read-in as design trajectories, incorporating fuel consumption and emission characteristics. Reference inventories are then scaled and adjusted for altitude, for each region, based on the relative changes between old, current and NGA. Combined with Open AirClim (OAC), the framework enables open-source, system-level assessments of future emissions, aircraft innovations, and their climate impacts.