Climate Impact

The Climate Impact tool evaluates the full environmental footprint of aircraft trajectories, including both CO₂ and non-CO₂ effects. It enables users to explore and compare climate mitigation strategies by adjusting key parameters related to operational cost, environmental performance, and air traffic complexity. Users can define spatiotemporal inputs (date, time, flight level) and select one of three analysis modes:

• Business as Usual (BAU): Optimized flights for operational efficiency, minimizing fuel consumption and flight time.

• Micro Scale: Focused on identifying the “greenest” trajectories at the individual level, prioritizing climate impact reduction regardless of network constraints.

• Macro Scale: Optimized at network level, balancing environmental improvements with safe and manageable traffic flows by accounting for dynamic flight interactions.

The tool provides four core visualization layers: the Contrail map, which highlights regions with high warming potential from contrail formation, the Net Average Temperature Response (ATR) Map, which identifies areas contributing significantly to net warming potential, the Complexity Map displaying air traffic density and congestion levels, indicating potential safety and operational constraints, and the Cost vs. Emissions Comparison Plots, which show the increase or decrease of the selected environmental KPI relative to the baseline scenario, enabling assessment of the financial implications of alternative environmental strategies.

The tool has been developed by UC3M.

Watch the short video below to explore the tool in action.