Smart flight routing: Avoiding contrails that warm climate

Kurzfassung

To avoid formation of persistent contrails means to avoid flights through ice supersaturated regions (ISSRs). Generally flying deviations to avoid ISSRs is, however, neither possible nor necessary. If we only try to avoid contrails that warm climate, it suffices to change perhaps 5% of flown distances. To make this possible and to find out the 5% distances that have to be changed one needs aviation weather forecasts that (1) predict ice supersaturation and (2) are able to compute a metric for the expected damage a contrail would cause if it would be produced at a certain time in a certain ISSR. This metric can be used in the flight routing procedure as an additional cost function. In the talk I will show how far such a procedure has been set up by the German UFO project.