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Transatlantic Flight Times and Climate Change Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 024008 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/2/024008 LETTER Transatlantic flight times and climate change OPEN ACCESS Paul D Williams1 RECEIVED Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK 24 November 2015 1 Address for correspondence: Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Reading RG66BB, UK. REVISED 11 January 2016 E-mail: [email protected] ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Keywords: aircraft, aviation, climate impacts, flight routes, jet stream, journey times 12 January 2016 PUBLISHED 10 February 2016 Abstract Original content from this Aircraft do not fly through a vacuum, but through an atmosphere whose meteorological work may be used under the terms of the Creative characteristics are changing because of global warming. The impacts of aviation on climate change Commons Attribution 3.0 have long been recognised, but the impacts of climate change on aviation have only recently begun to licence. fi Any further distribution of emerge. These impacts include intensi ed turbulence and increased take-off weight restrictions. Here this work must maintain we investigate the influence of climate change on flight routes and journey times. We feed synthetic attribution to the author(s) and the title of atmospheric wind fields generated from climate model simulations into a routing algorithm of the the work, journal citation fl fl and DOI. type used operationally by ight planners. We focus on transatlantic ights 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 h20 min and over 7h00 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. 1. Introduction routes and journey times. This subject has received relatively little attention, but is potentially important It has long been recognised that aviation affects the because of the acute sensitivity of the commercial climate, through the radiative forcing associated with aviation sector to fuel costs (Karnauskas et al 2015). greenhouse-gas emissions and contrails (Stuber The route between two airports that minimises the et al 2006, Lee et al 2009). However, it is becoming distance travelled is the great circle, which is the sphe- increasingly clear that the interaction is two-way and rical equivalent of a straight line. However, it is more that climate change has important consequences for economical to minimise the journey time than the dis- aviation. For example, stronger mid-latitude wind tance travelled. For this reason, aircraft routinely devi- shears in the upper troposphere and lower strato- ate from the great circle route in a carefully optimised sphere appear to be destabilising the atmosphere and manner, to benefit from tailwinds or avoid headwinds causing clear-air turbulence to intensify (Williams and (Lunnon and Marklow 1992). The day-to-day varia- Joshi 2013). At ground level, warmer air reduces the bility of flight routes and journey times is therefore lift force on the wings of departing aircraft and appears dictated by the horizontal wind field in the atmosphere to be increasing the likelihood of take-off weight (Palopo et al 2010). The inter-annual variability of restrictions (Coffel and Horton 2015). Here we flight routes and journey times between Hawaii and investigate the influence of climate change on flight the continental USA has been found to be caused © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 024008 Figure 1. Changing winter winds in the north Atlantic sector. Blue vectors (one per grid point) indicate the horizontal wind field in the atmosphere at the 200 hPa level, averaged over 20 winters (from 1December to 28February) in the GFDLCM2.1 climate model. Panel (a) shows a pre-industrial control simulation and panel (b) shows the equilibrated anomaly in a doubled-CO2 simulation. − Coloured shading indicates the magnitude of the wind vectors in m s 1. The black line indicates the great circle route between New York and London. predominantly by anomalous wind patterns asso- another (Woollings and Blackburn 2012, Haarsma ciated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation and Arc- et al 2013). The strengthening is composed partly of tic Oscillation (Karnauskas et al 2015). Although the changes to the zonal wind field, which are the thermal North Atlantic flight corridor between Europe and wind response to upper tropospheric warming sepa- North America is one of the worldʼs busiest, with rated by a latitudinally sloping tropopause from lower approximately 600 crossings each day (Irvine stratospheric cooling (Lorenz and DeWeaver 2007). et al 2013), little is known about the long-term The strengthening is also composed partly of changes response of transatlantic flight routes and journey to the meridional wind field, which are a consequence times to the wind changes associated with global of changes to the stationary planetary wave structure warming. (Haarsma and Selten 2012, Simpson et al 2016).By The average wintertime jet-stream winds in the projecting the wind vectors in figure 1 onto the great upper troposphere and lower stratosphere of the circle route from New York to London, we calculate north Atlantic sector are generally projected to that the average along-track (tailwind) component of become stronger in response to greenhouse-gas for- the wind field at typical flight cruising altitudes increa- − cing, as shown in figure 1. This strengthening is con- ses by 14.8% from 21.4 to 24.6 m s 1 when the carbon sistent across the current generation of climate dioxide (CO2) concentration is doubled. The early models, although the magnitudes and structures of the stages of this strengthening perhaps contributed to a strengthening vary in detail from one model to well-publicised transatlantic crossing from New York 2 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 024008 ⎛ ⎞2 to London on 8 January 2015, which took a record dtround ⎜⎟w dw » 2⎝ ⎠ .4() time of only 5 h16 min because of a strong tailwind tround U w from an unusually fast jet stream (Crilly 2015). The aim of the present study is to perform a For flights between New York and London, we −1 −1 detailed investigation of the influence of climate substitute w = 21.4 ms and d3.2w = ms (see ) = −1 change on flight routes and journey times. The focus is section 1 together with U 250 m s and on transatlantic flights between London and New tround = 12 h to yield a predicted round-trip journey- York, and how they change when the atmospheric time increase of 1 min 35 s. We will return to this analytic result in section 4, to compare it with the concentration of CO2 is doubled. Section 2 illustrates predictions of an alternative approach that is more the important concepts in a simple model, which is rigorous but computationally expensive. approximate but has the benefit of yielding analytic predictions. Section 3 pursues a more comprehensive treatment, by feeding synthetic atmospheric wind 3. Minimum-time routes fields generated from climate model simulations into a routing algorithm of the type used operationally by The conceptual model presented in section 2 is a flight planners. Section 4 concludes the paper with a simplification, because in reality the atmospheric statistical analysis and discussion. winds vary in space and time. Determining the fastest route between two points in a given wind field is a 2. Conceptual model mathematical problem in the calculus of variations. The Euler–Lagrange equation reduces to a two-point boundary value problem in time, which was derived in The following conceptual model illustrates the influ- the 1930s for motion in two and three Cartesian ence of wind changes on flight times. Suppose that a dimensions (Zermelo 1930, 1931, Levi-Civita 1931) constant horizontal wind of speed w blows along the and in the 1940s for motion on the surface of a sphere great circle from a western airport to an eastern airport (Arrow 1949). Various algorithms have been devel- a distance d away. Truncated Taylor series expansions oped to solve the problem (Bijlsma 2009, Jardin and show that an aircraft travelling with air speed U w Bryson 2012). The resulting minimum-time (or wind- will incur an eastbound journey time of: optimal) route deviates from the great circle and d therefore covers a greater distance, but the increased teast = Uw+ ground speed resulting from faster tailwinds or slower d ⎛ w w 2 ⎞ headwinds more than compensates. The minimum- »-+⎜11⎟ () U ⎝ U U 2 ⎠ time route is optimal in the sense that it would be flown in a completely unrestrained system without and a westbound journey time of: adverse weather, turbulence (Kim et al 2015), climate impact considerations (Sridhar et al 2011, Irvine d et al 2013), or air traffic control constraints. Despite twest = Uw- these restrictions, the evidence is that actual filed flight d ⎛ w w 2 ⎞ routes do lie reasonably close to the minimum-time »++⎜1.2⎟ () U ⎝ U U 2 ⎠ routes (Palopo et al 2010), which also minimise the fuel cost.
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