EGU25-20347, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-20347
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Atmospheric and climate effects of NOx emissions from Aviation and Rocket launches
Wuhu Feng1,2,3, Yuwen Li2, Martyn Chipperfield2, John Plane3, Daniel Marsh3, Joanna Egan3, Shuijie Chang2, Alexandru Rap2, Weiyu Zhang2, Alexander Archibald4, Tyler Brown5, Laura Revell5, Alfonso Saiz López6, Jean-Paul Booth7, and Douglas Kinnison8
Wuhu Feng et al.
  • 1National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (w.feng@ncas.ac.uk)
  • 2School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
  • 3School of Chemistry, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
  • 4National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
  • 5School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
  • 6Department of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate, Institute of Physical Chemistry Rocasolano, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
  • 7) Laboratoire de Physique des Plasma (LPP), CNRS, Sorbonne Universite, École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France
  • 8National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA

There have been long concerns on the potential environmental impact of aviation, which is the second biggest source of transport greenhouse gas emissions after road transport. Direct emissions from aviation accounted 3.8% of total CO2 emissions, which is estimated to contribute ~3.5% to the anthropogenic effective radiative forcing of climate (IPCC). The environmental impact of emissions from space launches is currently receiving much attention due to the space industry being one of the fastest growing global economic sectors. Since the first assessment of the impact of rocket emissions by Cicerone and Stedman (1974), there have been many developments in rockets and modelling. Rocket emissions can inject significant quantities of gases and particles into the atmosphere (including chlorine compounds HCl, H2O, CO2, NOx, H2, Al2O3 and black carbon), potentially affecting ozone depletion, the dynamics of the atmosphere, and climate change. Feng et al. (2023) have investigated stratospheric ozone depletion due to the presence of small satellites (e.g., CubeSats) with an iodine propulsion system to keep them in orbit. They have shown that an increase in the number of small satellite launches could cause substantial ozone depletion in the Antarctic.

In this work, we have incorporated the up-to-date aviation emission inventories (Teoh et al., 2024) and rocket emissions (Brown et al., 2023) into a state-of-the-art global chemistry-climate model (NCAR’s Community Earth System Model, CESM2) to explore how aviation and rocket emissions affect the stratospheric ozone layer and climate once the gases and particulates are injected into the atmosphere. The model includes dynamics, transport, aerosol microphysics, photochemistry, radiation, emissions, and their influences on stratospheric ozone depletion. We have carried out many model experiments in CEMS2 using different configurations (free running, specific-dynamic versions of Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model) with different chemistry and NOx emissions scenarios from aircraft and rocket emissions (from zero NOx emissions, released NOx emission inventories and up to 100 times NOx emissions) to assess the atmospheric changes induced by these emissions under historical and future scenarios.

How to cite: Feng, W., Li, Y., Chipperfield, M., Plane, J., Marsh, D., Egan, J., Chang, S., Rap, A., Zhang, W., Archibald, A., Brown, T., Revell, L., Saiz López, A., Booth, J.-P., and Kinnison, D.: Atmospheric and climate effects of NOx emissions from Aviation and Rocket launches, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-20347, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-20347, 2025.