The British weather service Met Office is collaborating with a Swedish company to test whether flight routes can be planned based on weather as a way to reduce fuel consumption and thus climate impact, reports SVT Nyheter.
Swedish Avtech has developed a technology – ClearPath – that calculates the optimal altitude at which the aircraft should fly and where the change in altitude should occur in order to burn as little fuel as possible.
The Met Office, which has begun a collaboration with Avtech, believes that the technology can reduce the aviation industry's climate-impacting carbon dioxide emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons each year, according to SVT News.
– This may sound trivial, but it is a very complex calculation that is not only based on the weather but also the aircraft's weight, speed and other factors. The result is an optimized flight path with minimized fuel consumption for each individual flight, says Niklas Persson, Marketing Manager at Avtech, to the TV channel.
Researchers Jana Moldanova and Göran Finnveden tell SVT that the technology primarily has the potential to reduce the so-called high-altitude effect, which means that aircraft at high altitude affect the climate through emissions of nitrogen oxide and contrails.
