PhD: Eco-efficient aircraft routing to largely reduce climate impact due to warming contrails

Aviation is a strong and growing sector that guarantees long-range mobility. However, it also contributes significantly to climate change. Emissions from aircraft increase the atmospheric concentrations of e.g., carbon dioxide, ozone, and water vapour. Another very important effect is the formation of contrails, which contribute to climate change with a relatively large uncertaines. Futhermore, the effects of contrails can be waming or cooling depending on time and location. First results indicate that a slight re-routing and avoiding regions with warming contrail formation, significantly reduce aviation’s contribution to climate change.

Your work will be part of the European project BeCoM, which aims at improving the prediction of persistent contrails with the strong support of the enhanced routine humidity measurements at the cruise level, enabling reliable mitigation of aviation’s climate impact driven by climate-based policy and regulations. These eco-efficient solutions will be investigated with an Earth-System Model, which includes an air traffic simulator, allowing for various air traffic optimisations.

Your research includes active discussions with the European project partners to develop optimisation strategies, implementing them in the air traffic simulator, optimizing flight trajectories subject to different strategies and to analyse in depth the simulated atmospheric response with respect to contrails, chemical composition and carbon dioxide.