Density altitude is the biggest factor in aircraft take off on a given runway length, temperature, and altitude. I know this from firsthand experience as I used to be a private pilot – until my hearing got so bad that I decided I was a danger to myself and others. This study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society claims the number of days with a density altitude issue at some airports will increase per RCP model scenarios in 2050-2070. Of course they are assuming that the RCP models produce an accurate output, and that airplanes of the 2050-2070 era have the same airfoil efficiency and takeoff power of today.
Climate change and the impact of extreme temperatures on aviation
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Abstract
Temperature and airport elevation significantly influence the maximum allowable takeoff weight of an aircraft by changing the surface air density and thus the lift produced at a given speed (Anderson 1999). For a given runway length, airport elevation, and aircraft type there is a temperature threshold above which the airplane cannot take off at its maximum weight and thus must be weight restricted. The number of summer days necessitating weight restriction has increased since 1980 along with the observed increase in surface temperature. Climate change is projected to increase mean temperatures at all airports and significantly increase the frequency and severity of extreme heat events at some (Scherer and Diffenbaugh 2013; Donat et al. 2013; IPCC 2012). These changes will negatively affect aircraft performance, leading to increased weight restrictions especially at airports with short runways and little room to expand. For a Boeing 737-800 aircraft, we find that the number of weight restriction days between May and September will increase by 50-200% at four major airports in the United States by 2050-2070 under the RCP8.5 emissions scenario (Moss et al. 2010). These performance reductions may have a negative economic effect on the airline industry. Increased weight restrictions have previously been identified as potential impacts of climate change (National Research Council 2008; US Global Change Research Program 2009), but this study is the first to quantify the effect of higher temperatures on commercial aviation. Planning for changes in extreme heat events will help the aviation industry to reduce its vulnerability to this aspect of climate change.
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Do we really need to read this crap? The nearby Aspen airport at 7800 feet altitude has a day or two every few years where it is too hot for airplanes to take off. Considering the lapse rate, 3.5°F/1000ft, sea level cities would have to warm some 27°F above current nominal temperatures to have an equivalent effect. It ain’t gonna happen.
I can’t help but laugh at the feigned concern for the profits of airline companies. Every proposal to ‘fight global warming’ has far worse impacts on the economics than the ‘problem’ does. They offer amputation at the neck as a headache cure.
So what is the rcp 8.5 emissions scenario?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathways
It’s the IPCC worst-case emissions scenario. 8 and a half watts per square meter energy increase. Not very likely even under the believer’s assessments.
So- amputation at the neck to cure an improbable risk of a headache. Sounds legit.
These exponentially calculated emissions increases remind me that Ray Kurzweil’s exponential growth of technology forecasts have us in the Singularity by the timeframe of this ‘problem’. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil
Reality and virtual reality will be virtually indistinguishable by then, undoubtedly changing the airline industry so unforeseeably that this forecast will seem absurd. Something like a pre-telephone calculation of ever-increasing numbers of telegraph delivery boys being needed by 2014.
An important thing to note is that Kurzweil’s predictions have proved far more accurate than the IPCC’s.
Didn’t the obesity crisis start around 1980? In the future only skinny people will know what flying is. 🙂
Of course if the oceans started to melt as fast as the models claim they should, then the height above sea level for all of these airports will be reduced which will result in the air at those airports getting thicker.
Oops, I meant glaciers melting, causing the oceans to rise.
My bad.
Two Canadian pilots coming in to land at an airport, think the runway is very short, so they do a flyover. It is short, so they plan the landing, knowing they have very little marging for error.
They come in just above stall speed, with full flaps, and apply emergncy braking. They come to a halt in the grass just at the end of the runway.
Pilot – “That is the shortest runaway I have ever seen!”
co-pilot – “yeah, it is. But look how wide it is. It must be 2 miles wide!”
I’m not sure if this is making fun of Canadians or marvelling at their landing skills. We do certainly know how to Take Off, Eh also!
Thanks – I definately needed the eye-tearing chuckle this morning
Magnetic anomaly?
Its articles like this that cause me to doubt Global Warming. This is a pointless study to booster the case for global warming solutions. If they exaggerate in this article, how many other areas are they exaggerating? They assume that the Engineers at Boeing will do nothing to accommodate lower atmospheric densities. If there is warming airplanes will be redesigned to accommodate the warming and runways will be lengthened. If this study came from Boeing or Airbus it would carry some weight.
“The number of summer days necessitating weight restriction has increased since 1980 along with the observed increase in surface temperature. …………………….
……….These performance reductions may have a negative economic effect on the airline industry. ”
——-
Ok, fair enough……These guys trying a point out the probable negative impact-effect on the airline industry due to performance reduction because of an Agw projected by an IPCC model……fair thus far……..but if anyone can help with information about the winter days necessitating airport closures because of heavy snowing and frost as being increased or decreased since the 1980 in comparison to the summers days necessitating weight restriction and the probable negative effect in comparision in the both cases…….. that I think will be a better picture of what already happening, probably!
Increased airport closures due to cold and snow in winter may already have a much higher negative effect on the airline industry then in case of summer days…….or maybe not!
maybe someone may help with such an information…….!
cheers
Thunderstorms are probably the most disruptive weather factor for the airline industry in the US.
Aren’t they affected by global warming? The authors tackled the wrong problem! They should have gone for increased thunderstorm activity and the lengthy ground stops on some out of the way part of the airport that usually ensue.
Are thunderstorms actually increasing in either numbers or severity or both?
Who knows? For the purposes of climate science, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
msg,
BL:
For ‘Climate Science’ as practised by some, I agree that it truly doesn’t matter.
Is the grant money still coming in?
Then – more of the same.
I’m sure many climate scientists do seek the truth [as each individual sees it . . . . ] but there seem to be some who are, oh, carbonistas, shall we say?
Auto
I don’t dislike this report that much. They say the airline industry needs to plan for changes. I can’t argue against that, but it would be helpful to have a realistic idea of what the changes are going to be, and the climate models we have don’t come close to doing that.
I think is is very silly to be talking about 737-800s as if it they will be still around in 2050.
Unfortunately it will. It is to be called the 737 Max, and apart from new engines, it is much the same as the 737-800. Please see my longer post below.
R
notice how they use the anomalously cold period ending in 1980 as their comparison period
Actually then there is this. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2850110/Passengers-told-PUSH-plane-brakes-froze-minus-52C-temperatures-Russia.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
Sadly this is another example of just how the academia jamboree continues.
They sit around just thinking stuff up, apply for a grant to fund themselves for the next two or three years and then produce drivel to justify what they have been up to.
From the academic’s point of view it’s all fair game and until and unless somebody is brave enough to put a stop to it, it will go on and on. I cannot believe most of these guys actually believe what they are producing – it’s just too bizarre.
To be fair, with the open hostility to anything moving anywhere south of panic, who in their right mind would do anything different?
There is a big mountain to climb and it needs somebody with big boots to make the climb easier.
Totally crazy articles like from organizations like the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, are a dire reminder that all of humanity now has become the subject of an evil doctrine comparable with the NAZI Regime that wouldn#t have existed without it´s propaganda program.
There is only one difference.
We´re all Jews now.
Sorry.
Not NAZI.
They, the NAZIs, were very B A D – as I think everyone agrees.
Our Climateers [our Carbonistas] are certainly misguided.
I think some are greedy [for money, tenure, status, publicity, sexual partners, pleasant foreign travel to conferences in agreeable locations, and the rest. Individual motivations need to be left to the individual.]
I agree that they have a propaganda arm [like most major league sports companies (etc.), if with different aims].
But – they are not NAZIs.
A handful may be unpleasant – ‘watermelons’, a term I’ve used before, but – I repeat, n fact, I insist:
They are not NAZIs.
Please check what Hitler’s NAZIs did.
Executed some millions (6 million is the best estimate I have seen] because they were the wrong: race; sexuality; or religion – an awful lot of Jews were killed, for example, most of the 6 million or so, simply because they were Jewish.
Plus:
A World War that killed 50-60 million [about the ‘present’ population of the UK], and about 2% of – the t h e n – global population, and affected a billion, or more.
And led to the development of computers at Bletchley Park, and atomic bombs.
The long term consequences of our Carbonistas’, our fellow humans’, desires, and if taken to a [maybe not their] logical conclusion, is a huge [75% or 90%, 95% possibly] cut in global human populations.
You?
Me?
Our families, friends?
How might this affect the global communication and global trade that we rely on?
Could it be back to the comms and economics of he700s, when Charlemagne ruled, or Offa (of the dyke)?
At the higher end – seeking a global population in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions – they will see a lot of folk die alone – no children, no partner . . . .
A horrible conclusion. I think, anyway.
Auto
Right. Worry about hot temps, but snow/ice isn’t an issue, like today in the east US. Same ‘ol model-flup.
i’m going to be traveling on one of these-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2416809/Return-zeppelin-Firm-unveils-gigantic-airship-revolutionise-goods-carried-world.html
Surely, this is good news for the Hot Air fanatics, as the reduced number of flights will cut CO2 “pollution”. QED!
Think of it this way: airlines might have to take some weight out of their planes by, you know, spacing the seats out a bit further.
I’d say that’d be a good thing, if fuel prices fell enough that they could make money flying like that…
😉
In fact, I wonder if there’s a grant in the great climate-science slop pit for a paper on The Impact Of Global Warming On Airline Seat Pitch.
They can not predict the weather 30 days out but can tell us all about “extreme weather” years from now caused by some trace gas that has not had an effect for almost 20 years now.
Terrific. You tax dollars at work.
Did they ask anyone in the commercial aircraft industry? Apparently not. How do they think commercial jets have been taking off from Lima, Peru, for the past 50 years? When I worked at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft (they build jet engines for those that don’t know) back in the late ’60’s, it was routine to use water injection in the engine when extra power was needed for hot days or high altitude.
Apparently these studies are funded because the Obama administration has directed all branches of the government to prepare for global warming. And college professors have to bring in “research” dollar to keep their jobs.
Oh dear… we haven’t even fully figured out how lift is generated… maybe, if we manage to do that in the next 50 years, we can deal with a slight increase in global temperature?
Is there anything that ol’ devil CO2 won’t make worse?
Just wait and see! For anyone that believes there’s no conspiracy going on….do you really believe this kind of tripe would be published without a motive other than CAGW?
Tripe.
Important subject.
MarkI –
Global warming will slim our pigs, so trimming the volume of our porcine tripe, and perhaps the flavour, unless taken with watermelon!
{I am not sure if this applies to politicians at the trough . . . }
Make runways from reflective material instead of the black absorbing stuff OR travel in winter
They can shovel all they want … these studies all have that same distinctive aroma …
http://tianatozer.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/shoveling-shit.jpg
16R at SLC is 12000 feet long, and the surface is a white-gray concrete. We once got a Beech King airborne off of it in mid August, at 30% throttle, and still had a good 7 miles of flat desert ahead of us. (we did have clearance from ATC to use the entire runway as part of a training exercise). If you can’t get airborne off that patch of ground then you should just park the plane and walk to your destination
I hate to be a party pooper on the hatin’ going on above, but this is actually one of the few things I’ve seen referenced here that makes sense if one allows that jet technology and design is flat and that all other things in the climate are equal. It is, in fact, more probable that it will be warmer in 2050 than today as opposed to cooler because CO_2 is, in fact, a greenhouse gas and it is, in fact, strictly more likely that an increase will lead to a positive temperature bias relative to any temperature that might otherwise have held then (although in a chaotic system with natural variation and feedbacks of largely unknown and unpredictable character the expectation value of the bias and its comparative size relative to the probable scale of the “noise” of unpredictable variation is difficult to estimate). It is also worthy of note that one has to weight the result with the probability of RCP8.5. This is basically a direct extrapolation of CO_2 increase rates assuming no change whatsoever in the scaling of its growth all the way through 2050, hence it assumes that fossil fuel costs remain flat relative to competing technologies and fuel sources, it most definitely assumes that we don’t develop either fusion or significant PV solar resources in the meantime, it assumes no development of LFTR or improvements or deployments of uranium fission based power. If one considers e.g. RCP6.0 or less to be more plausible on this timescale, one has to further adjust the Bayesian weight accorded to the conclusions accordingly.
(the probable number of new infections generated per existing infection) greater than 1, ideally much greater than 1, and just the right ratio of incubation time to first appearance of symptoms and death.
Still, given these caveats the reasoning and conclusion seem sound. Sure, one can very likely take existing data on days with temperatures or other conditions leading to weight restrictions per airport, make a reasonable assumption regarding the increase in the number of such days, and publish it.
One is free to wonder what weight should be given to the unstated Bayesian priors attached to the estimate. Then one is equally free to ask — at what point does publishing speculations of this sort stop being “science” or even a practical part of planning for the future and start being politics?
For example: Could I reasonably publish a report entitled “Probable effects of a gamma ray burst on the price of wheat in Nebraska”? How about “Estimating the likely extinction rate of North American species that would result from a 1 kilometer asteroid impacting in the mid-Pacific”? I think not, because we have no reasonable way of estimating the prior probability of either a gamma ray burst or 1 kilometer asteroid collision, outside of concluding on the basis of the observational fact that they are pretty damn rare, so rare that the conclusions of these studies would be little more than science fiction, of no practical use whatsoever.
A study entitled “The likely epidemiology of a mutated Ebola virus”, on the other hand, seems more difficult to judge. On the one hand, it is something of great interest, as some mutations might well make Ebola into a global pandemic capable of wiping out half of the human species. Even though these mutations are probably also rare, they aren’t as rare as gamma ray bursts of a magnitude capable of killing off Earth species, especially when integrated over not just Ebola but all viruses capable of causing such a pandemic including the flu, SARS, etc. The information might be useful even if Ebola per se doesn’t ever so mutate. However, the use of the word likely in the title is suspect. How can we even begin to compute the likely trajectories or impacts of all possible mutations of the Ebola virus, and integrate out a weighted probability distribution of probable outcomes independent of probable responses by the medical and scientific community, outcomes that might well be altered by the publication of the paper itself? The title (and very likely the paper) oversimplifies things to the point where once again the paper is almost certainly going to be the journal equivalent of Frank Slaughter’s lovely book:
http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Frank-G-Slaughter/dp/0090621611/
Could plague make a comeback and wipe out much of America? Well sure! All that is required is just the right mutation, a medical/scientific community that is slow to react, and
Note well that I know this because I’ve studied statistical epidemiology for one brief interval twenty-odd years ago when my wife was an Infectious Disease fellow, and wrote an actual numerical simulation of the process as a Markov chain. Way cool stuff and definitely worth publishing because it is generically useful. It applies to any mutation of a potentially lethal biological agent.
If HIV, for example, had been spread by mosquito bites or casual contact — sneezing in a room — so that the probability of transmission from one human to another given any contact at all was high, it would have wiped out most of the human species. In all other respects it was a perfect pandemic agent — a very long interval when an infected person was nominally infectious but otherwise asymptomatic, and pretty much a 100% kill rate months to years after infection. Only people with some sort of natural immunity or people in isolated communities who defended their isolation with extreme prejudice would have survived, and if there were an animal reservoir they wouldn’t have survived. I could write a gangbusters novel about this even today, and it would be good because it could still happen! All it takes is just the right mutation, if not of HIV than of some other currently innocuous or self-limiting infection.
But is this science? The statistics and modelling yes. The extrapolation of model results, especially unaccompanied by any disclaimer of the essentially unknown and uncomputable prior probability of the many, many assumptions keyed to any particular claims of outcomes? I’d have to rank that as science fiction.
The top article is right on the edge between. It’s a good idea to plan for the future and make suitable investments. If I were running and airline, I’d want to know this as it might well affect my decisions concerning the optimal airplane design for future purchases, decisions that could lead my company to bankruptcy if I make them poorly. On the other hand, I’d feel very frustrated in not being able to assign a useful expectation value to the probable costs, because I have literally no way to reasonably estimate the probability of RCP8.5. So, useful planning guide? Political scaremongering? Science fiction? You decide.
rgb
A very reasonable factor that was left out of the prognostication is that of miniaturization and substitution of lighter materials (when hasn’t this been happening?). People’s baggage, computers, materials are getting lighter and smaller. Maybe people will all be slim and in good shape. Probably dinner trays on board could be half their weight and the entertainment system, and…. Perhaps a graphene-skinned plane should be considered possible by 2050 – 2070. You couldn’t even fly the computers that were used for relatively simple tasks 30-40 years ago. By 2050, we will probably be able to roll up our computers in film form, with our files in the ether waiting for us when we get to our destination.
It would have been a much higher quality study if it had estimated how much lighter we and our baggage would likely have to be to maintain performance given a range of realistic temperatures – probably no big problem at all. With due deference to rgb’s points, it is a how.- much-manure type article.
Yes, but Americans are getting bigger and fatter.
What hatin’? Pointing out all the flaws in this study isn’t hate. Neither is ridicule, providing the ridicule doesn’t turn into ad hominem attacks on the researchers themselves.
This is our tax dollars at work. In case you missed the sarcasm, I mean the exact opposite. As an American taxpayer I am allow to point out the waste of time, money and other countless resources. As a thinking person in a mostly-free country, I have the right to point out the problems with the study.
Oh, for Gawd’s sake. Even if the technology stays stagnant, they can put bigger engines on.
Seriously?
In mining exploration and development during the late 60s early 70s in Yukon, 3 airstrips. IIRC, were bulldozed on the crests low ridge in the Dawson Range (a lot of traffic of personnel, supplies and equipment). It was exciting taking off into a southerly wind in a DC3 because the strip sloped noticeably downward and after takeoff, you continued to lose a bit of altitude over the bogs at the end of the ridge before gaining altitude. Going north you had the advantage when landing of slowing quickly climbing up the strip, but taking off, you were lugging into the air. There were no accidents in two seasons of their operation. Helicopters were stationed at each strip (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) for onward ferrying of personnel and small equipment, drill steel etc. The heli pilot at Uranus got tired of people asking how’s Uranus!
Were there skid marks on the other runways too or just on Uranus?
I’ll get my hat…