Targeted Use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel to Maximize Climate Benefits.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) can reduce aviation's CO and non-CO impacts. We quantify the change in contrail properties and climate forcing in the North Atlantic resulting from different blending ratios of SAF and demonstrate that intelligently allocating the limited SAF supply could multiply its overall climate benefit by factors of 9-15. A fleetwide adoption of 100% SAF increases contrail occurrence (+5%), but lower nonvolatile particle emissions (-52%) reduce the annual mean contrail net radiative forcing (-44%), adding to climate gains from reduced life cycle CO emissions.

Mitigating the Climate Forcing of Aircraft Contrails by Small-Scale Diversions and Technology Adoption.

The climate forcing of contrails and induced-cirrus cloudiness is thought to be comparable to the cumulative impacts of aviation CO emissions. This paper estimates the impact of aviation contrails on climate forcing for flight track data in Japanese airspace and propagates uncertainties arising from meteorology and aircraft black carbon (BC) particle number emissions. Uncertainties in the contrail age, coverage, optical properties, radiative forcing, and energy forcing (EF) from individual flights can be 2 orders of magnitude larger than the fleet-average values.

A Newly Developed mm-Wave Sensor for Detecting Plaques of Arterial Vessels.

Background: Microcalcifications within the fibrous cap of the arteriosclerotic plaques lead to the accrual of plaque-destabilizing mechanical stress. New techniques for plaque screening with small detectors and the ability to differentiate between the smooth and hard elements of plaque formation are necessary.

Method: Vascular plaque formations are characterized as calcium phosphate containing structures organized as hydroxylapatite resembling the mineral whitlockite.

Detection of (133)Xe from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the upper troposphere above Germany.

After the accident in the Japanese Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March 2011 large amounts of radioactivity were released and distributed in the atmosphere. Among them were also radioactive noble gas isotopes which can be used as tracers to test global atmospheric circulation models. This work presents unique measurements of the radionuclide (133)Xe from Fukushima in the upper troposphere above Germany.