Assessing the climate impact of formation flights

Emissions of aviation include CO2, H2O, NOx and particles. While CO2 has a long atmospheric residence time and is uniformly distributed in the atmosphere, non-CO2 gases, particles and their products have short atmospheric residence times and are heterogeneously distributed. Their climate effects depend on chemical and meteorological background...

Algorithmic climate change functions for the use in eco-efficient flight planning

Aviation contributes significantly to anthropogenic climate change, and one promising possibility for mitigation is eco-efficient flight planning by avoiding climate sensitive regions with only small changes in the aircraft trajectories. Climate sensitive regions result from strong spatial variation of the global climate impact of local non-CO2...

Verification of the ozone algorithmic climate change functions for predicting the short-term NOx effects from aviation en-route

For the first time, the algorithmic Climate Change Functions (aCCFs) for ozone, methane, water vapor, and persistent contrails have been developed within the ATM4E project to provide information on the climate sensitive regions, which can be conveniently implemented for the climate based flight routing. These aCCFs need to be verified before...

Mitigating the Climate Impact from Aviation: Achievements and Results of the DLR WeCare Project

The WeCare project (Utilizing Weather information for Climate efficient and eco efficient future aviation), an internal project of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR), aimed at finding solutions for reducing the climate impact of aviation based on an improved understanding of the atmospheric impact from...