Interestinghttps://www.greenbiz.com/article/ai-has-finger-pulse-transport-industry
Flying through the aviation sector
Google is also leveraging AI across aviation. The tech giant recently piloted an AI tool to help address contrails, which form when an airplane flies through a layer of humidity at a certain altitude, creating a thin white line, similar to a cloud. The 2022 IPCC report notes that contrails account for roughly 35 percent of aviation’s global warming impact due to the heat they trap that would otherwise leave the atmosphere. Thus, Google’s AI tool has the potential for the meaningful gap-bridging I mentioned earlier.
Juliet Rothenberg, Google’s lead product manager for the climate AI team, shared a bit more about two areas the company is exploring next with this tool: (1) scaling it and (2) addressing the highest-impact emissions area for aviation — nighttime contrails.
In terms of scaling, the company is focused on mass distribution and is working with software platforms that already help airlines and pilots monitor turbulence data when flight planning and during flights, to incorporate Google's contrail tool directly. As for the highest-impact areas of application, Rothenberg shared that the company will focus more on nighttime contrails, which is more impactful because the Earth’s heat that otherwise would leave the atmosphere is 100 percent trapped at night — as opposed to daytime contrails when some heat escapes the atmosphere.
"One of the really exciting proof points from our work with American Airlines is that contrails could be one of the most cost-effective solutions for the aviation industry [in reducing emissions]," said Rothenberg. "And that [impact] gets even more cost-effective as we start looking at nighttime contrails … so as we continue to develop the science and conduct research, focusing on the areas that are the highest impact is going to be our goal."