Climate-optimized aircraft trajectories
An option to reduce aviation impact on climate, are operational measures which optimize individual aircraft movements by minimizing their climate impact. Thus improved flight guidance and routing avoid in particular climate-sensitive regions of the atmosphere, e.g. contrail forming areas or areas with strong ozone production. This requires a profound understanding how aviation climate impact depends on location (geographic position and altitude) as well as time of flight, i.e. which prevailing weather patterns are involved. On the other side, such information need to be provided by an adequate interface to flight planning tools and air traffic management (ATM), and be integrated in such systems.
Objective of our work is to provide the scientific basis for a sustainable development of aviation, and to evaluate and identify operational measures of flight guidance. The climate impact of the aviation transport system is quantified under consideration of different flight routes. For the first time, the impact of aviation on climate is considered as one parameter in this optimization. The Institute of Atmospheric Physics follows an interdisciplinary approach, which starts from a particular meteorological situation and develops associated climate cost functions, in order to analyse route options in the frame of flight guidance, with the overall objective to optimize aircraft trajectory planning with the help of performance criteria.