Transatlantic flight times and climate change

Aircraft do not fly through a vacuum, but through an atmosphere whosemeteorological characteristics are changing because of global warming. The impacts of aviation on climate change have long been recognised, but the impacts of climate change on aviation have only recently begun to emerge. These impacts include intensified turbulence and increased take-off weight restrictions. Here we investigate the influence of climate change onflight routes and journey times.We feed synthetic atmospheric wind fields generated from climatemodel simulations into a routing algorithmof the type used operationally byflight planners.We focus on transatlanticflights between London andNew York, and how they changewhen the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is doubled.We find that a strengthening of the prevailing jet-streamwinds causes eastboundflights to significantly shorten andwestbound flights to significantly lengthen in all seasons. Eastbound andwestbound crossings inwinter become approximately twice as likely to take under 5 h20min and over 7 h00min, respectively. For reasons that are explained using a conceptualmodel, the eastbound shortening andwestbound lengthening do not cancel out, causing round-trip journey times to increase. Even assuming no future growth in aviation, the extrapolation of our results to all transatlantic traffic suggests that aircraft will collectively be airborne for an extra 2000 h each year, burning an extra 7.2million gallons of jet fuel at a cost ofUS$ 22million, and emitting an extra 70million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of 7100 average British homes.Our results provide further evidence of the two-way interaction between aviation and climate change.