Contrail Altitude Estimation Based on Shadows Detected in Landsat Imagery

Contrails contribute to global warming by trapping outgoing terrestrial radiation, exerting an immediate warming influence on the climate. The climatic impact of contrails is potentially comparable to that of aviation’s carbon emissions. This underlines the importance of minimizing contrail formation to mitigate the climate effects of aviation,...

Contrail minimization through altitude diversions: A feasibility study leveraging global data

As global flight volume rises, the aviation industry is facing increasing climate challenges. One major factor is the impact of contrails, which trap outgoing terrestrial radiation and counteract emission reduction benefits from emission-optimized flight routes. Our study quantifies contrail-forming flights globally and assesses altitude...

Assessing and Modelling Climate Optimal Flights Using Open Surveillance and Remote Sensing Data

Sustainability is the biggest challenge facing the aerospace industry today. With the global number of flights expected to rise, the climate impact of aviation will continue to increase. Current research states that the rerouting of aircraft through wind-optimisation for the purpose of fuel usage minimisation and emission reduction is an...

Examining Contrail Formation Models with Open Flight and Remote Sensing Data

One of the biggest challenges facing the aerospace industry today is its sustainability. As the number of flights is expected to rise globally, aviation’s climate impact will continue to increase. Current research has extensively addressed the rerouting of aircraft through wind-optimization in order to minimize fuel burn and emissions. Such...

Preliminary Design and Capacity Study of Automatic Dependent Surveillance for Drones

The consumer drone sector is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades. In Europe alone, some predictions show as many as seven million drones will be flying by 2050. This poses a challenge for surveillance. In this paper, we study an Automatic Dependent Surveillance system concept similar to the one for current aircraft surveillance, which...

The 1090 Megahertz riddle: A guide to decoding mode S and ADS-B signals: Second edition

Interactive Textbook. In the last twenty years, aircraft surveillance has moved from controller-based interrogation to automatic broadcast. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the most common methods for aircraft to report their state information like identity, position, and speed. Like other Mode S communications,...

Analyzing Aircraft Surveillance Signal Quality at the 1090 Megahertz Radio Frequency

Due to the increasing demands for real-time air traffic monitoring, the 1090 megahertz radio frequency has become the most utilized communication channel for aircraft surveillance purposes. Several services are using the radio frequency at the same time, which are Mode A/C communications and Mode S communications. These different types of...

pyModeS: Decoding Mode-S Surveillance Data for Open Air Transportation Research

The availability of low-cost automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) receivers has given researchers the ability to make use of large amounts of aircraft state data. This data is being used to support air transportation research in performance study, trajectory prediction, procedure analysis, and airspace design. However, aircraft...

Large-Scale ADS-B Data and Signal Quality Analysis

To investigate the contradicting findings of previous studies that investigated ADS-B quality, a study was per-formed to analyze the data and signal quality of ADS-B. For this study, a large dataset of raw ADS-B messages was analyzed, regarding the quality of the data and the signal, differentiating between internal and external sources of...