How can an aircraft’s contrails, which are artificial ice clouds formed from hot engines and cold altitudes, contribute to climate change? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the rising impact of aviation contrails on climate change. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, legislators, and the public better understand aviation’s contributions to climate change and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it.
For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate the climate impacts of contrails, which have limited data compared to carbon dioxide emissions due to the former’s much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere. After running almost 500,000 simulations of aircraft flying over the North Atlantic, the researchers discovered that contrails contribute to approximately 15 percent of aviation’s climate footprint. While the team found a wide variety of results largely dependent on weather conditions, they are optimistic that their results could benefit climate scientists by curtailing contrails.
“Our research provides a basis for strategies to reduce the climate impact of contrails,” said Dr. Susanne Pettersson, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chalmers University of Technology and a co-author on the study. “Our calculations can be used for optimization of flight routes where climate impact is considered alongside, for example, fuel cost and travel time. The results give airline operators and air traffic management new tools for climate optimization. This could bring significant climate and societal benefits.”
This study comes as climate change continues to ravage the planet with an increasing strength and number of weather events, specifically hurricanes and summer temperatures, both of which continue to break records.
What new insight into contrails and climate change will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Nature Communications, EurekAlert!
Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5 | André Karwath
