Aviation contributes to about 3.5% of the total anthropogenic climate change when including non-CO2 effects, e.g., contrail formation and the impact of NOx emissions on ozone and methane. Among various non-CO2 effects, the contrail-cirrus radiative forcing is the largest (~2/3) with large uncertainties. The most critical affecting factor is the huge weather-induced variability of the radiative impact of individual contrails, which imposes challenges on formulating adequate mitigation measures and develop policy-driven implementation schemes, stressing relevance of reliable forecasts. The newly funded EU project BeCoM intends to address the uncertainties related to the forecasting of persistent contrails and their weather-dependent individual radiative effects. The project will focus on: 1) obtaining a larger and higher resolution database of relative humidity and ice supersaturation at cruise levels for assimilation into numerical weather prediction (NWP) models; 2) providing more adequate representation of ice clouds in their supersaturated environment in the NWP models; and 3) validation of the predictions to determine and reduce the remaining uncertainties of contrail forecasts. To facilitate the assimilation and validation process, a novel hybrid artificial intelligence algorithm will be developed. Based on the contrail prediction, the project will develop a policy framework for effective contrail avoidance through a trajectory optimization approach. The results will enable a better understanding of contrail’s climate impact and formulate recommendations on how to implement strategies to enable air traffic management to reduce aviation's climate impact.@en

iation is responsible for approximately 5% of global warming and is expected to increase substantially in the future. In the face of the continuing expansion of air traffic, mitigation of the aviation’s climate impact becomes challenging, but imperative. Among various mitigation options, hybrid electric aircraft (HEA) has drawn intensive attention due to its large potential in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. The non-CO2 effects (especially the contrails) of the HEA on the climate change, however, remains ambiguous. As the first step to understand the climate impact of HEA, this research aims to investigate the impact on the formation of persistent contrails when flying with HEA. The simulation is performed using the Earth System model (EMAC) coupled with a CONTRAIL submodel, where the Schmidt Appleman Criterion (SAC) is adapted to estimate changes in the potential contrail coverage (PCC) globally. The analysis shows that the HEA forms contrails at relatively lower temperature than conventional aircraft. At the same altitude, the reduction in contrails formation is mainly observed in the tropical regions where the temperature is warmer. With a smaller fraction of electric power in use, the contrail coverage remains nearly unchanged. As the degree of hybridization increases further to 90%, an exponential reduction in the contrail formation is expected with a maximum value of about 40%. @en

Air traffic is important to our society and guarantees mobility especially for long distances. Air traffic is also contributing to climate warming via emissions of CO2 and various non-CO2 effects, such as contrail-cirrus or increase in ozone concentrations. Here we investigate the climate impact of a future aircraft design, a multi fuel blended wing body (MF-BWB), conceptually designed within the EU-project AHEAD. We re-calculate the parameters for the contrail formation criterion, since this aircraft has very different characteristics compared to conventional technologies and show that contrail formation potentially already occurs at lower altitudes than for conventional aircraft. The geometry of the contrails, however, is similar to conventional aircraft, as detailed LES simulations show. The global contrail-cirrus coverage and related radiative forcing is investigated with a climate model including a contrail-cirrus parameterisation and shows an increase in contrail-cirrus radiative forcing compared to conventional technologies, if the number of emitted particles is equal to conventional technologies. However, there are strong indications that the AHEAD engines would have a substantial reduction in the emission of soot particles and there are strong indications that this leads to a substantial reduction in the contrail-cirrus radiative forcing. An overall climate impact assessment with a climate-chemistry response model shows that the climate impact is likely to be reduced by 20% to 25% compared to a future aircraft with conventional technologies. We further tested the sensitivity of this result with respect to different future scenarios for the use of bio fuels, improvements of the fuel efficiency for conventional aircraft and the impact of the number of emitted soot particles on the radiative forcing. Only the latter has the potential to significantly impact our findings and needs further investigation. Our findings show that the development of new and climate compatible aircraft designs requires the inclusion of climate impact assessments already at an early stage, i.e. pre-design level. @en

Current air traffic routing is motivated by minimizing economic costs, such as fuel use. In addition to the climate impact of CO2 emissions from this fuel use, aviation contributes to climate change through non-CO2 impacts, such as changes in atmospheric ozone and methane concentrations and formation of contrail-cirrus. These non-CO2 impacts depend significantly on where and when the aviation emissions occur. The climate impact of aviation could be reduced if flights were routed to avoid regions where emissions have the largest impact. Here, we present the first results where a climate-optimized routing strategy is simulated for all trans-Atlantic flights on 5 winter and 3 summer days, which are typical of representative winter and summer North Atlantic weather patterns. The optimization separately considers eastbound and westbound flights, and accounts for the effects of wind on the flight routes, and takes safety aspects into account. For all days considered, we find multiple feasible combinations of flight routes which have a smaller overall climate impact than the scenario which minimizes economic cost. We find that even small changes in routing, which increase the operating costs (mainly fuel) by only 1% lead to considerable reductions in climate impact of 10%. This cost increase could be compensated by market-based measures, if costs for non-CO2 climate impacts were included. Our methodology is a starting point for climate-optimized flight planning, which could also be applied globally. Although there are challenges to implementing such a system, we present a road map with the steps to overcome these. @en

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 aviation by making use of measurements and modeling approaches. WeCare made some important contributions to advance the scientific understanding in the area of atmospheric and air transportation research. We characterize contrail properties, show that the aircraft type significantly influences these properties, and how contrail-cirrus interacts with natural cirrus. Aviation NOx emissions lead to ozone formation and we show that the strength of the ozone enhancement varies, depending on where within a weather pattern NOx is emitted. These results, in combination with results on the effects of aerosol emissions on low cloud properties, give a revised view on the total radiative forcing of aviation. The assessment of a fleet of strut-braced wing aircraft with an open rotor is investigated and reveals the potential to significantly reduce the climate impact. Intermediate stop operations have the potential to significantly reduce fuel consumption. However, we find that, if only optimized for fuel use, they will have an increased climate impact, since non-CO2 effects compensate the reduced warming from CO2 savings. Avoiding climate sensitive regions has a large potential in reducing climate impact at relatively low costs. Taking advantage of a full 3D optimization has a much better eco-efficiency than lateral re-routings, only. The implementation of such operational measures requires many more considerations. Non-CO2 aviation effects are not considered in international agreements. We showed that climate-optimal routing could be achieved, if market-based measures were in place, which include these non-CO2 effects. An alternative measure to foster climate-optimal routing is the closing of air spaces, which are very climate-sensitive. Although less effective than an unconstrained optimization with respect to climate, it still has a significant potential to reduce the climate impact of aviation. By combining atmospheric and air transportation research, we assess climate mitigation measures, aiming at providing information to aviation stakeholders and policy-makers to make aviation more climate compatible.@en