Model studies on the global impact of aviation emissions on aerosol and climate

Abstract:

We use the EMAC global model with the aerosol module MADE to quantify the impact of aviation emissions on the global aerosol. We focus on the year 2000, prescribing the emissions according to the CMIP5 inventory, and on the year 2030, according to the four RCP scenarios. Various sensitivity experiments are performed to further quantify: (i) the uncertainty behind different assumptions on the size distribution of aviation-emitted particles; (ii) the effect of aviation fuel sulfur content on the simulated impacts; (iii) the linearity of the system’s response to emission perturbation. The simulations show that the aviation impact on particle mass (black carbon and sulfate) is small, on the order of a few percent, whereas a large effect is found for particle number. In the northern mid-latitudes’ upper troposphere (7-12 km), up to 30-40% of the modelled particle number concentration is attributable to aviation. Significant effects are also simulated at the ground, due to the emissions from landing and take-off cycles. The aviation induced perturbations to the particle number concentrations are very sensitive to the assumptions on the size distribution of emitted particles and on the fuel sulfur content. The simulated aviation-induced RF in the year 2000 is in the range of −69.5 to 2.4 mW/m². The bulk of this RF is due to aerosol-cloud effects, in particular to the perturbation of low clouds. All RCP scenarios project an increase in the aviation impact in 2030, ranging between a factor of 2 to 4 with respect to 2000, albeit with large uncertainties.