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Transatlantic flight times and climate change

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Transatlantic flight times and climate change
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23
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Aircraft do not fly through a vacuum, but through an atmosphere whose meteorological characteristics are changing because of global warming. The impacts of aviation on climate change have long been recognised, but the impacts of climate change on aviation have only recently begun to emerge. These impacts include intensified turbulence and increased take-off weight restrictions. Here we investigate the influence of climate change on flight routes and journey times. We feed synthetic atmospheric wind fields generated from climate model simulations into a routing algorithm of the type used operationally by flight planners. We focus on transatlantic flights between London and New York, and how they change when the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is doubled. We find that a strengthening of the prevailing jet-stream winds causes eastbound flights to significantly shorten and westbound flights to significantly lengthen in all seasons. Eastbound and westbound crossings in winter become approximately twice as likely to take under 5 h 20 min and over 7 h 00 min, respectively. For reasons that are explained using a conceptual model, the eastbound shortening and westbound lengthening do not cancel out, causing round-trip journey times to increase. Even assuming no future growth in aviation, the extrapolation of our results to all transatlantic traffic suggests that aircraft will collectively be airborne for an extra 2000 h each year, burning an extra 7.2 million gallons of jet fuel at a cost of US$ 22 million, and emitting an extra 70 million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of 7100 average British homes. Our results provide further evidence of the two-way interaction between aviation and climate change.
Electric power distributionClimateVideoComputer animation
Moving walkwayGround (electricity)FACTS (newspaper)Global warming
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Strahlstrom <Kernphysik>FlightWindMeeting/Interview
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Climate changeComputer animation
WindWinterStrahlstrom <Kernphysik>Impact eventMeeting/Interview
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FlightStrahlstrom <Kernphysik>Meeting/Interview
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
When we think of global warming, we're usually thinking of the fact that it's getting warmer at ground level, but in fact the temperatures are changing higher up in the atmosphere too, including where planes fly at 35,000 feet.
The atmospheric winds and temperatures up there are very strongly tied together, and therefore the winds are changing in response to the temperature changes. Our new study finds that the jet stream winds along the flight route between London and New York are getting stronger because of climate change. For example, they're getting 15% stronger in winter,
and this increase in the jet stream winds is going to have impacts on people's flights. We found that transatlantic aircraft will be in the air for an extra 2,000 hours each year because of these changes to the jet stream wind patterns, and this is going to add about $22 million to airline fuel costs, and of course it's also going to increase their CO2 emissions.
So passengers will have a significantly increased chance of delayed arrivals in North America. We've just looked at transatlantic flights, but if other flight routes around the world that are affected by the jet stream are also impacted by these effects, then this could just be the tip of the iceberg.