Can Google AI make flying more sustainable?

Contrails (those fluffy, white cloud things you sometimes see behind airplanes) are surprisingly responsible for about 35% of aviation’s global warming impact. Researchers at Google partnered with American Airlines to study if Google AI could accurately predict contrail forming regions, so pilots could choose routes to avoid them. Their initial results suggest that contrail avoidance could be the most cost-effective way to mitigate aviation’s climate impact. Learn more about this research at: https://g.co/research/contrails

Weather images at 2:43 courtesy of https://windy.com
Satellite images at 1:33 courtesy of Landsat/Copernicus.
Satellite images from 2:46-4:01 and 5:08-5:12 courtesy of Landsat.
Satellite images from 4:01-4:17 courtesy of GOES-16/NOAA.

Research papers:
Sridhar, Banavar & Ng, Hok & Chen, Neil. (2011). Aircraft Trajectory Optimization and Contrails Avoidance in the Presence of Winds. Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics. 34. 10.2514/1.53378.

Meijer, Vincent R, Kulik, Luke, Eastham, Sebastian D, Allroggen, Florian, Speth,
Raymond L et al. 2022. “Contrail coverage over the United States before and during the
COVID-19 pandemic.” Environmental Research Letters, 17 (3).

Meerkötter, R. & Schumann, Ulrich & Dölling, D.R. & Minnis, Patrick & Nakajima, Takakau & Tsushima, Y.. (1999). Radiative Forcing by Contrails. Annales Geophysicae. 17. 1080-1094. 10.1007/s00585-999-1080-7.

Adapted with permission from Mitigating the Climate Forcing of Aircraft Contrails by Small-Scale Diversions and Technology Adoption. Roger Teoh, Ulrich Schumann, Arnab Majumdar, and Marc E. J. Stettler. Environmental Science & Technology 2020 54 (5), 2941-2950, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b05608

Teoh, R., Schumann, U., Gryspeerdt, E., Shapiro, M., Molloy, J., Koudis, G., Voigt, C., and Stettler, M. E. J.: Aviation contrail climate effects in the North Atlantic from 2016 to 2021, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22, 10919–10935, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-10919-2022, 2022.

Research papers licensed under CC BY 4.0.