Towards climate optimized flight trajectories in a climate model

Abstract

Aviation contributes to the anthropogenic climate impact through emissions. Mobility becomes more and more important to society and hence air transportation is expected to grow further over the next decades. Mitigating the climate impact from aviation emissions is needed and a climate compatible air transportation system is required for a sustainable development of commercial aviation. A number of studies suggest avoiding climate sensitive regions by re-routing horizontally and vertically: climate optimized routing. This includes several routing strategies (mitigation options) and shows a great potential for a climate impact reduction, since most of the climate impact arises from non-CO2 emissions, which are short-lived and vary regionally. This study introduces a new assessment platform AirTraf, which is a simplified model to perform long-term global air traffic simulation in a climate-chemistry model, enabling the assessment of routing strategies. A demonstration of a one-day AirTraf simulation was performed using 103 flight plans for transatlantic flights of Airbus A330 aircraft. The results confirmed that AirTraf simulates the air traffic properly both for flights along the great circle and wind-optimal strategies.