Integrating EO and Copernicus Atmospheric services into emergency response tools to support flight planning Applications

Aviation is a vulnerable infrastructure. This is not only true during economic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic but also during natural hazards, especially airborne ones. Airborne hazards can be detected and observed by Earth Observation (EO) instruments. Most EO sensors that observe air pollutants fly on Sun-synchronous satellites. The strength of these satellites is global coverage and provision of high spatial resolution measurements. Their disadvantage is, that they do not observe high temporal variations of air pollutants. This is a severe limitation for the detection of natural hazards. One solution is to combine observations from Sun-synchronous (e.g., OMI, GOME2, TROPOMI, IASI, OMPS, AIRS) and geostationary (e.g., MSG-SEVIRI for Europe and Africa) instruments.

The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers (VAACs) are responsible for predicting the dispersion of the volcanic plumes for the aviation sector. In addition, GeoSphere Austria supports the Austrian aviation authority (Austro Control) with information on volcanic ash and SO₂ dispersion generated by the GeoSphere Austria emergency response Volcano Tool (GeoSphere Austria-VT). Since dispersion information needs to be available shortly after the eruption, VAACs and GeoSphere Austria forecasts are both based on rough estimates of source term parameters. The usage of near-real-time observations can significantly improve the source terms, and reduce the dispersion uncertainty. The GeoSphere Austria-VT is extended with a dynamic inverse modelling system that provides sequentially updated source terms using satellite data.

Apart from flying through volcanic plumes resulting possibly in a significant hazard, flying through regions with elevated air pollution levels has an impact on engine lifetime, maintenance costs, and fuel consumption. Here, the relevant factor is the cumulative air pollution intake over time. Additional costs associated with maintenance and repair are currently not considered in flight planning. Continuous monitoring, forecasting, and optimizing data integration of air pollutants into atmospheric models has thus two significant advantages: on the one hand, the obvious risk associated with flying through highly polluted air (including volcanic ash and SO₂) is reduced, on the other hand, the impact on engine maintenance and fuel costs for airline operators and engine manufacturers is minimized. From the wide range of air pollutants, we will focus on aerosols (volcanic, dust and salt) and SO₂, because these are the most relevant air pollutants for the aviation sector.

The aim is to implement a flexible, holistic system that is able to consider both hazardous and non-hazardous air pollution levels. The emphasis is on making extensive use of existing services (SACS, CAMS, VAACs) as well as air quality observations from satellites to extend and improve model applications (GeoSphere Austria-VT). To provide end-users with one comprehensive tool for the analysis and comparison of the air pollutants distribution from selected sources, these products will be available and visualized in one new data platform, exploiting a datacube-like approach to deal with the different spatial and temporal resolutions of the data.