Climate Impact Evaluation as Part of Aircraft Pre-Design

Abstract

Here we present a methodology, which allows for an optimization of aircraft design aspects with regard to climate change. During the optimization, each iteration requires an estimate of a 3d emission distribution and from that an estimate of the climate impact. Hence it is necessary to distinguish the climate impact of two emission sets. This is difficult because considerable uncertainties of the overall climate impact from air traffic still exist. These uncertainties arise to a large extend from uncertainties in atmospheric processes. We address this problem by determining the difference in climate impact of two aircraft configurations for a large subset of parameter settings representing those atmospheric processes. Therefore a Monte-Carlo-Simulation for uncertainties of climate impacts is performed with AirClim, an efficient tool for climate evaluation of aircrafttechnology. The methodology is introduced and the principle mechanism is presented exemplarily with an application to aircraft emission inventories. The results show that although large uncertainties exist in the overall climate impact estimate of current air traffic, small differences in the emission pattern lead to stochastic significant changes in the climate impact. In the future this approach can be applied to evaluate and possibly minimize the climate impact of new aircraft technology.