Google has partnered with American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy, the climate change investment foundation founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, to create an artificial intelligence-powered contrail cloud pre-map system. This system will allow pilots to choose flight routes that avoid potential contrail clouds, thereby reducing the impact of contrail clouds on global warming.
As the aircraft passes through the high humidity layer, condensation contrail clouds will form in the air, and may last for several hours under the prevailing atmospheric conditions, making it difficult for the ground's radiant heat to be released.
According to the research statistics in the paper, contrail clouds, mainly formed by aircraft, account for about 35% of the impact of global warming.
Therefore, the contrail cloud preset map system developed by Google in collaboration with American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy hopes to use artificial intelligence to enable aircraft pilots to avoid high humidity layers, thereby reducing the formation of contrail clouds.
This system was developed by Google researchers using an open-source contrail cloud model provided by Breakthrough Energy, combined with a large amount of satellite imagery, to use artificial intelligence to predict locations where contrail clouds may form. This allows aircraft pilots to more accurately determine which flight paths will form contrail clouds.
In the past six months, American Airlines pilots conducted 70 tests, which reduced the formation of contrail clouds by about 54%.
