Name: Laura Wilcox
Institution: University of Reading
Research: Using the NGS to model the climate impact of aircraft emissions
The contribution of water vapour emissions to the impact of aviation on climate has not been assessed for a number of years and is often assumed to be negligible. However, this assumption may not be robust when the variability of the atmospheric circulation is taken into account.
The aim of Laura’s research is to quantify the climate impact of water vapour emissions from aircraft by modelling the four-dimensional motion of emissions after their release into the atmosphere. This allows the perturbation to the natural background humidity and the radiative effects of this to be calculated. Laura is also examining the role of the variability of the atmospheric circulation on these impacts.
The outcome of the research will be a revised estimate of the climate impact of water vapour emissions which will allow for more informed policy and operational choices. The work will also provide improved guidance on the impact of changes in routing and cruise altitude of aircraft on the climate impact of water vapour emissions.
To run her models, Laura uses a straight forward scientific code written in FORTRAN and compiled when needed. However the code reads large amounts of pre-prepated data while it runs and therefore needs a comparatively large amount of disk space and memory to do so. This is when Laura turned to the NGS.
Laura identified NGS sites with enough capacity to run the code and built copies of her program at each of these sites. she could then copy the wind and related data that drives the model to that site and submit jobs into the local batch system to process it. When the jobs were completed, the results could be copied back.
Explaining the benefits of using the NGS Laura said “Using the NGS allows enough simulations to be run in parallel that we have not had to compromise the resolution of our work in order to complete the simulations in a reasonable amount of time”.
The speed of her research as increased considerably as “without the NGS, it would take 2 years to model the motion of water vapour emissions during one winter. To complete all the model runs that we hope to perform on the NGS over the next few months would take 10 years on our department computers”.
Project funding - United States Federal Aviation Administration (US FAA).
PI - Professor Keith Shine
Download a summary slide of this case study.
