The role of plume-scale processes in long-term impacts of aircraft emissions

Abstract

Abstract. Emissions from aircraft engines contribute to atmospheric NOx, driving changes in both the climate and in surface air quality. Existing atmospheric models typically assume instant dilution of emissions into large-scale grid cells, neglecting non-linear, small-scale processes occurring in aircraft wakes. They also do not explicitly simulate the formation of ice crystals, which could drive local chemical processing. This assumption may lead to errors in estimates of aircraft-attributable ozone production, and in turn to biased estimates of aviation's current impacts on the atmosphere and the effect of future changes in emissions. This includes black carbon emissions, on which contrail ice forms. These emissions are expected to reduce as biofuel usage increases, but their chemical effects are not well captured by existing models. To address this problem, we develop a Lagrangian model that explicitly models the chemical and microphysical evolution of an aircraft plume. It includes a unified tropospheric–stratospheric chemical mechanism that incorporates heterogeneous chemistry on background and aircraft-induced aerosols. Microphysical processes are also simulated, including the formation, persistence, and chemical influence of contrails. The plume model is used to quantify how the long-term (24 h) atmospheric chemical response to an aircraft plume varies in response to different environmental conditions, engine characteristics, and fuel properties. We find that an instant-dilution model consistently overestimates ozone production compared to the plume model, up to a maximum error of ∼200 % at cruise altitudes. Instant dilution of emissions also underestimates the fraction of remaining NOx, although the magnitude and sign of the error vary with season, altitude, and latitude. We also quantify how changes in black carbon emissions affect plume behavior. Our results suggest that a 50 % reduction in black carbon emissions, as may be possible through blending with certain biofuels, may lead to thinner, shorter-lived contrails. For the cases that we modeled, these contrails sublimate ∼5 % to 15 % sooner and are 10 % to 22 % optically thinner. The conversion of emitted NOx to HNO3 and N2O5 falls by 16 % and 33 %, respectively, resulting in chemical feedbacks that are not resolved by instant-dilution approaches. The persistent discrepancies between results from the instant-dilution approach and from the aircraft plume model demonstrate that a parameterization of effective emission indices should be incorporated into 3-D atmospheric chemistry transport models.