Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FlyATM4E (Flying Air Traffic Management for the benefit of environment and climate) Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2022-11-30 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project Beyond the economically-driven desire to minimise fuel use and hence CO2 emissions, environmental aspects comprising climate impact are not considered in flight planning practices today. Aviation’s contribution to climate change currently amounts to 5% of the anthropogenic climate change with non-CO2 effects, such as contrail formation and the impact of NOx emissions on ozone and methane, contributing by the same order of magnitude as CO2 direct emissions. At present, flight routes are planned on the basis of minimizing operating costs. Concerning aviation induced climate change, impact of CO2 emissions is directly linked to fuel consumption, while non-CO2 emission impacts rather depend on regional and seasonal variations of meteorological conditions. Hence, the contribution of aviation’s non-CO2 effects to global warming (and derived climate change) is more difficult to assess due to its inherent complexity, and it depends on flight performance, weather conditions and time of emission.The global society is suffering from the impacts of climate change and global warming. Measures and methods have to be developed, defined and implemented to reduce the anthropogenic climate footprint. FlyATM4E is addressing the reduction of environmental impacts by identifying alternative climate-optimized aircraft trajectories by operational measures avoiding regions of the atmosphere which are in particular sensitive to aviation emissions. This enables the reduction of the climate impact of European air traffic, especially for individual flights, while increasing ATM efficiency. By developing methods and strategies to facilitate climate-optimised flight planning and thus limiting the climate change caused by aviation, not only in Europe, but globally applicable, FlyATM4E directly complies with the central element of the Paris Agreement. Moreover, during the course of the project, FlyATM4E developed and applied robust algorithmic climate change functions and formulated recommendations on implementing strategies for integrating climate change impact reduction flight planning into international aviation policies, strategies and planning and thereby complements the UN goal 13.2. FlyATM4E established close interaction between the scientific partners, aviation stakeholders and the general public and thereby guaranteed a broad dissemination of the project results.FlyATM4E developed a concept to identify climate-optimised aircraft trajectories which can help ATM to provide a robust and eco-efficient reduction in aviation’s climate impact and estimate associated mitigation potential, considering CO2 and non-CO2 emissions through MET data, ensemble prediction and eco-efficient trajectories. The FlyATM4E consortium built on its expertise covering the whole spectrum from atmospheric science and climate research to aviation operations research and aircraft trajectory optimization. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far FlyATM4E delivered a systematic analysis of the spatially and temporally resolved information on the climate effect of aviation’s emissions. This analysis for different seasons, geographical regions and flight altitudes was performed by using algorithmic climate change functions for a set of non-CO2 impacts including a particular focus on identifying sources of uncertainties. Flight trajectory optimization and planning tools were used to explore various possibilities on how to include uncertainties when identifying climate-optimized trajectories. For a systematic case study involving a set of typical winter days and summer days (June and Dec 2018), an air traffic sample was thoroughly selected for the European airspace analyzing city pairs and representative traffic in 2018. The tools for trajectory optimization were applied in order to identify climate optimized trajectories: ROOST, TOM and EMAC’s air traffic simulator AirTraf. AirTraf was developed further to include new algorithms, which allow the selection of eco-efficient flights concerning the predefined optimization objectives, constraints and the specific weather impacts. A long-term simulation was performed using the global chemistry climate model EMAC to investigate the potential of finding eco-efficient flights. As a main conclusion, the project results highlight that the mitigation potential of flight trajectory optimization shows a large temporal variability due to the variability of the underlying atmospheric conditions. Moreover, information on the mitigation potential of the whole air traffic sample could be used in the future as input for our optimization tools to limit cost penalties. Dissemination and Communication activities grew progressively with continuous stakeholder exchange. The communication channels were set, i.e. the project webpage (https://flyatm4e.eu/) a linked-in profile (https://www.linkedin.com/company/flyatm4e) and Twitter (@FlyATM4E), all with satisfying KPIs. During the project period, large interest has been experienced from outside the project in this topic leading to participation in a series of dissemination events comprising scientific conferences, stakeholder seminars, and contacts to regulators, as well as resulting in the publication of scientific papers. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) The project advanced concepts to assess the climate impact of ATM operations, which integrate an adequate representation of uncertainties, including CO2, contrails, ozone, methane, and water vapour climate effects, from weather forecast as well as climate science, and provided concepts for climate information enabling eco-efficient aircraft trajectories. It investigated aviation’s climate impact mitigation potential by developing robust flight planning algorithms by the integration of uncertainties from the climate impact analysis and ensemble weather forecasts in ATM. This resulted in a candidate enabler solution with a set of prototype algorithmic climate change functions published in the open source Python Library CLIMaCCF. This improved the assessment of aviation’s climate impact. FlyATM4E further identified those situations for which there is a large potential to reduce the climate impact with only little or even no cost changes (“Eco-efficient solutions”) and those situations where both climate impact and costs can be reduced (“Win-Win”) resulting in a candidate operational solution of climate-optimized trajectories. As a summary, FlyATM4E formulated recommendations for target stakeholders on policy actions how to implement these strategies in meteorological products and enabled not only the understanding of ATM possibilities to reduce aviation’s climate impact, but moreover how to implement such eco-efficient routing. FlyATM4E schematic workflow
