Global Air Traffic Modeling for Climate Change Assessment of Routing Strategies

Abstract

Aviation contributes to climate change e.g. via carbon dioxide, ozone and contrail-cirrus. Mobility becomes more and more important to society and hence air transportation is expected to grow significantly over the next decades. Mitigating the climate impact from aviation is needed. Currently, a number of studies suggest to avoid climate sensitive regions by re-routing either vertically or both horizontally and vertically. These mitigation options have a great potential in reducing the climate impact, since most of the climate impact arises from non-CO2 effects, which are short-lived and vary regionally. However, currently no assessment platform exists, with which different mitigation options can be assessed. Here we introduce a climate-chemistry model to which an air traffic model is coupled, enabling the assessment of re-routing strategies as well as technological options. A modeling strategy is presented, how re-routing strategies can be tested and may lead to recommendations for air traffic management.