Project Number: 078
Category: Combustion Products
Contrails are the white, line-shaped ice clouds that form behind aircraft. The goal of this project is to create a contrail avoidance decision support and evaluation tool that can be tested to optimize and evaluate the benefits, costs, and practicality of contrail avoidance. The project will focus on four specific objectives: (1) develop the capabilities necessary to predict the formation and impacts of contrails from a given flight; (2) evaluate the costs and benefits of deviating from that path to avoid a contrail, including uncertainty; (3) integrate these capabilities into an operational tool which can provide near-real-time estimate of the costs and benefits of a contrail avoidance action, informed by automated, coordinated observational analysis and modeling; and (4) evaluate the effectiveness of these tools in a safe, scientifically-sound real-world experiment. Subject to agreement with industry partners, the team will also seek to test contrail avoidance in a way that has no implications for air traffic control or safety.
This project will be the first to provide the tools and data to show that this approach is indeed an effective and efficient approach for contrail avoidance under real-world operating conditions and at scale.