Constraining Climate Impact Uncertainties from Future Aviation PDF Download

Author: Inés Sanz-Morère
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Environmental impacts from the aviation sector are in continuous growth. The total sector contribution to anthropogenic climate forcing is approximately 3.5%, representing up to 9% of US greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in 2018. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, it is also expected to grow at a global rate of approximately 4% per year in the next 20 years, and a full sector recovery is expected by 2024. The total impacts of aviation emissions on the climate, however, are still uncertain. This is due to factors including (i) the uncertainty regarding the radiative effects of short- and long-term climate forcers; (ii) the difficulty of validating modeling tools e.g. contrail formation and persistence or stratospheric chemical response to emissions; and (iii) the growing interest in new air transportation technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, supersonic aviation, or hydrogen and alternative fuels. These factors together require a persistent effort to improve the available tools assessing aviation environmental footprint. The objective of this thesis is to provide additional insights into aviation climate impacts, by improving current modeling capabilities. Specially, I aim to resolve elements that will be of increasing interest as the sector evolves. The work is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on improving climate impact estimates from contrails, ice clouds which form behind aircraft. Those are estimated to cause approximately half of the total climate forcing from aviation. The second part focuses on developing modeling tools for assessing climate impacts from future commercially viable supersonic fleets, as multiple companies are currently designing projects of that type (Aerion, Boom, Spike Aerospace, NASA, Lockheed Martin, etc.). In the first part, I develop a new contrail radiative forcing model with a new parameterization to model exchanges of radiation when multiple cloud layers overlap occur. My parameterization also reduces current uncertainties related to uncertainties in contrail microphysical structure. I find that, assuming maximum possible overlap, cloud-contrail overlap in 2015 increased the net radiative forcing from contrails. This effect was greatest in the North-Atlantic corridor. For 2015, contrail-contrail overlap results in a 3% net reduction in the estimated radiative forcing. Finally, using "in situ" measurements to constrain contrail microphysical evolution pathways, I find that the global net radiative forcing due to contrails in 2015 is between 8.6 and 10.7 mW/m2. Relative to the mid-point, this uncertainty range is less than one quarter of that previously reported in the literature. In the second part, I estimate the sensitivity of the global supersonic market and its climate impacts to factors such as design choice, regulations and economic assumptions. For this, I develop a detailed supersonic aircraft design model providing robust information on cruise altitude, fuel burn and emissions variation with aircraft design choice. I also, in order to address overland restrictions, develop a high-resolution routing algorithm, capable of assessing optimal routing for multiple regulatory options. I obtain that, in the absence of flight path restrictions, a fleet of 130-870 supersonic aircraft can be feasible, operating up to 2.5% of the seat-kilometers in the global aviation market. This will result in a net increase of fuel burn from commercial passenger aviation of up to 7%. However, between 78% and 100% of the global unrestricted market potentials cannot be addressed when supersonic flight is restricted over land or over areas with a population density of more than 50 inhabitants per square kilometer. When evaluating environmental impacts, aircraft design choice can change the sign of supersonic aviation impact on non-CO2 aviation climate forcing. In general, implementing supersonic aviation results in a global warming effect. However, if reducing fleet average NOx emission index by 58%, through an increase in fuel burn of 7%, climate forcing can change from positive (increase) to negative (reduction). Designs aiming to address high-value demand, at the upper bound of supersonic speeds (cruise Mach number = 2.2), are the most environmentally harmful because of their higher cruise altitude and fuel burn. While based on my results, we shouldn't expect any significant viable market from them, a 10% fleet substitution would be responsible of a doubling in global non-CO2 radiative forcing impact.