Current air traffic routing is motivated by minimizing economic costs, such as fuel use. In additionudto the climate impact of CO2 emissions from this fuel use, aviation contributes to climate changeudthrough non-CO2 impacts, such as changes in atmospheric ozone and methane concentrations andudformation of contrail-cirrus. These non-CO2 impacts depend significantly on where and when theudaviation emissions occur. The climate impact of aviation could be reduced if flights were routed toudavoid regions where emissions have the largest impact. Here, we present the first results where audclimate-optimized routing strategy is simulated for all trans-Atlantic flights on 5 winter andud3 summer days, which are typical of representative winter and summer North Atlantic weatherudpatterns. The optimization separately considers eastbound and westbound flights, and accounts forudthe effects of wind on the flight routes, and takes safety aspects into account. For all daysudconsidered, we find multiple feasible combinations of flight routes which have a smaller overalludclimate impact than the scenario which minimizes economic cost. We find that even small changesudin routing, which increase the operating costs (mainly fuel) by only 1% lead to considerableudreductions in climate impact of 10%. This cost increase could be compensated by market-basedudmeasures, if costs for non-CO2 climate impacts were included. Our methodology is a starting pointudfor climate-optimized flight planning, which could also be applied globally. Although there areudchallenges to implementing such a system, we present a road map with the steps to overcome these.
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