Improving Climate Policy Analysis Tools (COMPLETE)

Project Number: 021   COMPLETE
Category: Combustion Products

The ASCENT 21 project sets out to further enhance FAA’s capabilities to perform rapid environmental policy assessments with regard to aviation’s climate impacts. As such, the project focuses on the continued development of tools to assess how different aviation policy scenarios at the global, zonal and regional scales could affect the climate.

In particular, the ASCENT 21 team is supporting two efforts.

  • First, the team is further developing the Aviation environmental Portfolio Management Tool – Impacts Climate (APMT-I Climate). APMT-I Climate is a reduced-order model for estimating the current and future climate impacts of aviation under different growth and/or policy scenarios.
  • Second, the project concerns itself with a more detailed analysis of contrails, the white line-shaped clouds that form behind aircraft, which potentially result in significant climate impacts.

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