Demand Assessment for Climate Optimal Aircraft Trajectories at Network Scale

抄録

Aviation contributes to global warming through the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other non-CO2 effects. The climate impact associated with non-CO2 species highly depends on atmospheric location and time of the emissions. Hence, they can be mitigated by efficient climate-aware trajectory planning to avoid climate-sensitive regions. However, the increase in demand around climate hotspots caused by adopting individually optimized trajectories in a climate-friendly manner may not be practical due to the limited capacity of airspace. Consequently, the actual mitigation potential of climate impact needs to be analyzed at the network level to assess how the adoption of climate optimized trajectories affects Air Traffic Management (ATM) system performance. In this paper, we aim to study the effects of employing climate optimized trajectories on traffic demand. In this regard, taking climate impacts into account, aircraft trajectory optimization is performed for a scenario with 1006 flights in free-route airspace. Uncertainty in the meteorological conditions, as an essential factor affecting aircraft trajectories and estimated climate impacts, is addressed by performing ensemble trajectory prediction. The traffic demand for the optimized aircraft trajectories considering different routing options (ranging from costoptimal to climate optimal) is then assessed. The results show that as we move toward trajectories with lower climate impacts, in addition to the increase in the operational cost, the demand is considerably increased in the sectors adjacent to climate hotspots.