Rapid estimation of global civil aviation emissions with uncertainty quantification

• A computationally efficient tool for aircraft emissions estimation is developed.
• An openly available civil aviation emissions inventory is developed for 2005.
• 117.3–200.7 Tg of CO2–C and 1.761–3.804 Tg of NOx was emitted by civil aviation in 2005.
• We present estimates of uncertainty in fleet-wide aircraft emissions.

In this paper we describe the methods used to develop the open source Aviation Emissions Inventory Code and produce a global emissions inventory for scheduled civil aviation, with quantified uncertainty. We estimate that in 2005, scheduled civil aviation was responsible for 180.6 Tg of fuel burn, which agrees to within 4% of other published emissions inventories for 2004 and 2006. By comparing the Aviation Emissions Inventory Code with flight data records, we show that the mean bias in predicted fuel burn at the airport-pair level is +1% for an ensemble of 132 flights, and less than 10% for 5 of the 6 aircraft types used in the validation.