Non-CO2 Market-Based Incentives Towards Robust Climate Optimal Aircraft Trajectories

Abstract

Over the past several years, the expansion of the aviation industry has created serious environmental challenges. By using aircraft trajectory optimization to reroute climate-sensitive areas, there is a potential to reduce non-CO2 climate effects, which account for approximately two-thirds of aviation radiative forcing. However, as the determination of such climate hotspots and aircraft trajectories requires meteorological variables obtained from weather forecasts, they are affected by uncertainty. In addition, there is no climate policy for aviation non-CO2 emissions in the current planned market-based instruments, implying that rerouting sensitive areas to climate increases the operational costs as the aircraft tends to fly longer routes. To this end, this study proposes the determination of robust aircraft trajectories with objectives ranging from cost optimal to climate optimal routing options, accounting for uncertain meteorological conditions. To motivate airliners to utilize climate optimal routing strategy, the obtained robust trajectories are then assessed in terms of considering charges for emitting in highly climate-sensitive regions. It is shown that by including the cost of climate impact in the operational cost, it is possible to find ”win-win” scenarios in which both the operational cost and the climate impact are reduced. The uncertainty analysis shows that as we increase the charges for emitting in climate hotspots, the uncertainty in operational cost increases, which needs to be considered while setting up market-based instruments for non-CO2 emissions. Such an increase in uncertainty is related to the effects of uncertain meteorological conditions, mainly relative humidity, on quantifying the non-CO2 climate effects.