Operation Blue Skies: experimentation to reduce the climate impact of contrails begins

A UK-based consortium comprising Google, the UK Department for Transport, the Met Office, the Nats air traffic control service, Contrails.org, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, are launching Operation Blue Skies, an ocean-scale trial aimed at reducing the climate impact of aircraft contrails.

It is a £5m, 30-month programme, part-funded with £2.65m from the UK Government's Department for Transport. Clouds that form when water vapor condenses around soot particles from jet exhaust contribute to warming and account for about a third of aviation's total climate impact, according to a note from Google, which applies its AI to predict route changes to avoid contrail-sensitive regions. Operation Blue Skies will take place in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, in the Shanwick airspace, which accounts for about 5% of global warming due to contrails. The program involves two operational trials, each lasting approximately four months in the NATS-controlled Shanwick oceanic airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor.

“Each year around 10,000 flights from hundreds of cities will pass through Shanwick airspace during the test hours and a small percentage of these flights, which would otherwise pass through contrail-sensitive airspace, will be slightly diverted, preventing the formation of contrails that cause severe warming,” says Google, which is participating at no cost, contributing £1.4m in kind through AI research expertise, design time and high-performance computing infrastructure to drive progress open climate science.