During spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused massive reductions in emissions from industry and ground and airborne transportation. To explore the resulting atmospheric composition changes, we conducted the BLUESKY campaign with two research aircraft and measured trace gases, aerosols, and cloud properties from the boundary layer to the lower stratosphere. From 16 May to 9 June 2020, we performed 20 flights in the early COVID-19 lockdown phase over Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. We found up to 50% reductions in boundary layer nitrogen dioxide concentrations in urban areas from GOME-2B satellite data, along with carbon monoxide reductions in the pollution hot spots. We measured 20%-70% reductions in total reactive nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and fine mode aerosol concentration in profiles over German cities compared to a 10-yr dataset from passenger aircraft. The total aerosol mass was significantly reduced below 5 km altitude, and the organic aerosol fraction also aloft, indicative of decreased organic precursor gas emissions. The reduced aerosol optical thickness caused a perceptible shift in sky color toward the blue part of the spectrum (hence BLUESKY) and increased shortwave radiation at the surface. We find that the 80% decline in air traffic led to substantial reductions in nitrogen oxides at cruise altitudes, in contrail cover, and in resulting radiative forcing. The light extinction and depolarization by cirrus were also reduced in regions with substantially decreased air traffic. General circulation-chemistry model simulations indicate good agreement with the measurements when applying a reduced emission scenario. The comprehensive BLUESKY dataset documents the major impact of anthropogenic emissions on the atmospheric composition.@en

Aside from the climate impacts from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, civil aircraft currently in operation also emit nitrogen oxides (NOx), water vapor (H2O) and other non-CO2 pollutants whose combined primary and secondary effects account for almost 70% of aviation's net contribution towards anthropogenic global warming. NOx emissions, in the short-run, actuate the second largest aviation warming effect via indirect ozone (O3) formation [1], and, unlike CO2, the altitude, geographic location and time of emission are all significant drivers of their resulting climate impact. Past studies [2] have shown a positive correlation between emission altitude and warming from NOx emitted within the troposphere, but such analyses are frequently limited by emission inventories that largely focus on flights across the North Atlantic Flight Corridor (NAFC), thereby disregarding future shifts and alternate patterns in civil aviation traffic. We bridge this gap via global, Lagrangian and Eulerian simulations using the EMAC model wherein equal amounts of NO are released across five regions during two seasons, as was done in [3], but now for two additional flight levels that together cover typical subsonic cruise ranges of 10–12 km. The NOx-induced O3 production was calculated using two modelling methods, tagging and perturbation, as both are vastly used for climate effects estimations. The former is used to compute the contribution of a source to a whole while the latter is useful, for instance, in quantifying the total impact from variations in the strength of a source. We therefore characterize the relation between emission altitude and warming from short-term O3 on a global scale. These results and analyses then form an integral part of the development of next-generation surrogate models that will make climate-optimal routing a reality [4]. References [1] Lee, D. S., Fahey, D. W., Skowron, A., Allen, M. R., Burkhardt, U., Chen, Q., Doherty, S. J., Freeman, S., Forster, P. M., Fuglestvedt, J., Gettelman, A., De León, R. R., Lim, L. L., Lund, M. T., Millar, R. J., Owen, B., Penner, J. E., Pitari, G., Prather, M. J., Sausen, R., and Wilcox, L. J.: The contribution of global aviation to anthropogenic climate forcing for 2000 to 2018, Atmos. Environ., 244, 117834, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2020.117834, 2021. [2] Matthes, S., Lim, L., Burkhardt, U., Dahlmann, K., Dietmüller, S., Grewe, V., Haslerud, A. S., Hendricks, J., Owen, B., Pitari, G., Righi, M., and Skowron, A.: Mitigation of Non-CO2 Aviation's Climate Impact by Changing Cruise Altitudes, Aerospace, 8, 36, https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace8020036, 2021. [3] Maruhashi, J., Grewe, V., Frömming, C., Jöckel, P., and Dedoussi, I. C.: Transport patterns of global aviation NOx and their short-term O3 radiative forcing – a machine learning approach, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22, 14253–14282, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-14253-2022, 2022. [4] Rao, P., Dwight, R., Singh, D., Maruhashi, J., Dedoussi, I., Grewe, V., and Frömming, C.: Towards a new surrogate model for predicting short-term NOx-O3 effects from aviation using Gaussian processes, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-4337, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-4337, 2023. Acknowledgements This research is part of the ACACIA (Advancing the Science for Aviation and Climate; http://www.acacia-project.eu) project, which is funded by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework program under the grant agreement no. 875036. This study used the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative (grant nos. EINF-441 and EINF-2734).@en

We report on an inconsistency in the latitudinal distribution of aviation emissions between the data products of phases 5 and 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). Emissions in the CMIP6 data occur at higher latitudes than in the CMIP5 data for all scenarios, years, and emitted species. A comparative simulation with the chemistry-climate model ECHAM/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC) reveals that the difference in nitrogen oxide emission distribution leads to reduced overall ozone changes due to aviation in the CMIP6 scenarios because in those scenarios the distribution of emissions is partly shifted towards the chemically less active higher latitudes. The radiative forcing associated with aviation ozone is 7.6% higher, and the decrease in methane lifetime is 5.7% larger for the year 2015 when using the CMIP5 latitudinal distribution of emissions compared to when using the CMIP6 distribution. We do not find a statistically significant difference in the radiative forcing associated with aviation aerosol emissions. In total, future studies investigating the effects of aviation emissions on ozone and climate should consider the inconsistency reported here. @en

Flight altitude is relevant to the climate effects resulting from aircraft emissions. Other research has shown that flying higher within the troposphere leads to larger warming from O 3 production. Aircraft NO x emissions are of particular interest, as they lead to warming via the short-term production of O 3, but also to reduced warming via processes like CH 4 depletion. We focus on short-term O 3 production, as it constitutes one of aviation’s largest warming components. Understanding how O 3 formation varies altitudinally throughout the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere is essential for designing climate-compatible aircraft and routing. We quantify this variation by performing simulations with a global atmospheric chemistry model for three representative cruise altitudes, five regions and two seasons using three methods: Eulerian tagging, perturbation and Lagrangian tagging. This multi-method, regional approach overcomes limitations of previous studies that utilize only one of these methods and apply global emission inventories biased towards present-day flight distributions, thus limiting their applicability to future aviation scenarios. Our results highlight that underrepresenting emissions in areas with growing flight activity (e.g. Asia Pacific) may lead to significant, regional underestimations of the altitudinal sensitivity of short-term NO x -related O 3 warming effects in certain cases. We find that emitting in Southern regions, like Australasia, leads to warming larger by a factor of two when compared to global averages. Our findings also suggest that flying lower translates to lower warming from short-term O 3 production and that this effect is strongest during the local summer. We estimate differences ranging from a factor of 1.2-2.6 between tagging and perturbation results that are attributable to non-linearities of NO x -O 3 chemistry, and derived regional correction factors for a widely-used sub-model. Overall, we stress that a combination of all three methods is necessary for a robust assessment of aviation climate effects as they address fundamentally different questions.@en