Lufthansa has expanded its involvement in the IAGOS (In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System) climate research project and installed special measuring equipment on a second aircraft. The Lufthansa Airbus A330-300 with the tail number “D-AIKO” is gathering data on atmospheric trace elements and cloud particles at cruising altitude on all of its flights – on a global basis.
A team of experts from Lufthansa Technik performed the demanding task of installing the
instrument pack in the front-left part of the aircraft’s fuselage in partnership with Sabena Technics, the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the French CNRS research centre.
“Supporting climate research is important to Lufthansa, as our aircraft provide an excellent platform for measuring instruments. The data gathered at cruising altitude is particularly important for understanding our climate,” says Dr Gerd Saueressig, who is responsible for climate research projects in the Lufthansa Group.
After every landing, the data will be transmitted directly to the CNRS in Toulouse, where the IAGOS database is located. The data is used by numerous research facilities worldwide. The first IAGOS aircraft, the Airbus A340-300 “Viersen”, has been in deployment since 7 July 2011. That day, in cooperation with the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Lufthansa became the first airline worldwide to launch this innovative project for the long-term observation of the earth’s atmosphere during scheduled flight operations as a continuation of the successful MOZAIC programme, which had started in 1994.
Lufthansa Group has been a partner in the field of climate research for more than 20
years and currently also supports in addition to IAGOS other important climate research projects (for instance CARIBIC and AMDAR). In doing so, the Group is making an important contribution towards establishing a global measuring infrastructure for observing the Earth’s atmosphere with the help of civil aviation. In 2013, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) included the IAGOS project in its national roadmap for research infrastructure. The scientific council appointed by the BMBF believes that continuously recording atmospheric data on a global basis will make it possible to close an important knowledge gap so that more precise climate predictions can be made.