ND-MAX - NASA/DLR Multidisciplinary Airborne Experiment / Emission and Climate Impact of Alternative Fuel
Ramstein (Germany) - January/February 2018
As aviation emissions have an impact on air quality as well as on climate and air traffic is projected to increase over the next decades, mitigation concepts in global aviation are necessary to achieve the objectives of the Paris agreement on climate change. The potential climate benefits of alternative jet fuels were analyzed within the ND-MAX campaign. The key objectives comprised:
- the impact of alternative jet fuels on aircraft particle and trace gas emissions
- the chemical composition of aircraft exhaust plumes versus atmospheric background
- the effect of particle emissions on contrail formation and aviation-induced cloudiness
The collaborative campaign of the US American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) was stationed at the US and NATO Air Base Ramstein in January and February 2018. In total, eight research flights were conducted in two restricted air space areas over Northern Germany close to the seaside. The Advanced Technology Research Aircraft (ATRA) of DLR was fueled with various mixtures of the standard kerosene type Jet A-1 and bio-based alternative jet fuel. The DLR-ATRA and its exhaust plume and contrail were chased by the aircraft NASA DC-8 that contained a large set of physicochemical aerosol analysis instruments, several trace gas measurements, and basic meteorological parameters. ND-MAX is part of the “Emission and Climate Impact Project of Alternative Fuels” (ECLIF-II).
ERICA (ERC Instrument for the Chemical composition of Aerosols)
P. Brauner, A. Hünig, O. Appel, A. Dragoneas, S. Molleker, S. Borrmann
ND-MAX video on German TV (Tagesschau)
C. Voigt, S. Kaufmann, H. Schlager, D. Sauer (DLR)
B. Anderson, G. Diskin (NASA LaRC)
Schneider, J., Weigel, R., Klimach, T., Dragoneas, A., Appel, O., Hünig, A., Molleker, S., Köllner, F., Clemen, H.-C., Eppers, O., Hoppe, P., Hoor, P., Mahnke, C., Krämer, M., Rolf, C., Grooß, J.-U., Zahn, A., Obersteiner, F., Ravegnani, F., Ulanovsky, A., Schlager, H., Scheibe, M., Diskin, G. S., DiGangi, J. P., Nowak, J. B., Zöger, M., and Borrmann, S.: Aircraft-based observation of meteoric material in lower-stratospheric aerosol particles between 15 and 68° N, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 989–1013, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-989-2021, 2021.