Existing aviation emissions inventories lack accurate trajectory data for high-resolution social cost and health impact assessment. This paper develops a 3-D emissions map by reconstructing flight trajectories for US west coast hubs to estimate regional environmental and near-airport health impacts. A physics-informed autoencoder (AE) is applied to ADS-B trajectory records for January 2025 covering US west coast hubs. The encoder combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a Bi-GRU, and a 3-D CNN with skip connection; the decoder is a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). It is benchmarked against a baseline-AE and cubic spline interpolation. Emissions are mapped via EUROCONTROL Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) performance tables and ICAO Engine Emissions Databank (EEDB) emission indices, with altitude corrections via Boeing Fuel Flow Method 2 (BFFM2). Social costs are quantified for all flight phases, with health impacts assessed for Landing and Takeoff cycles within 50 km of each hub. The proposed AE model outperforms both a TCN-AE and cubic spline interpolation across 5% to 50% missing rates. Monetizing the emissions inventory shows NOx produces a small net cooling effect in direct climate forcing, while accounting for 99.7% of monetized air-quality and health cost despite being under 0.4% of CO2 by mass, making it the dominant health-cost driver. To our knowledge, this is among the first studies combining AE-based trajectory reconstruction with separate spatial-temporal feature encoding and altitude-based emissions modeling to produce a regional aviation emissions inventory for air quality, climate impact and population exposure. The resulting emissions map and social cost estimates provide quantitative context for environmental impact assessment and near-airport health policy evaluation for US domestic aviation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Proposed deep autoencoder architecture of the CBiG3D model.
Building accurate decision-support tools for next-generation air traffic control requires robust trajectory prediction models. We present a flow-matching architecture trained exclusively on historical aircraft trajectories, with no route labels or chart supervision. Trained on 1.15 million Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast trajectory windows collected over the San Francisco Bay Area, the model generates aircraft trajectory distributions that closely match historical traffic, reproducing known airspace structure around San Francisco Airport such as the shape of SFO's published NIITE FOUR departure procedure. Our model is trained directly on the native, irregular ADS-B sampling interval. Trajectory prediction is cast as sequence inpainting using a block-causal Transformer that denoises future state tokens conditioned on the observed history using Conditional Flow Matching or Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. We compare our architecture against constant-velocity, deterministic-Long Short Term Memory, and Conditional Variational Autoencoders baselines. At matched parameter count, CFM outperforms DDPM by 11-26% in minADE@20, and both generative objectives surpass the CVAE baseline by 31-41%. We further show that the error degrades gracefully with prediction horizon, and the architecture remains effective when retrained on temporally decimated feeds. Lastly, we sample K independent completions, yielding spatial probabilistic occupancy estimates that can serve as input to downstream conflict-risk estimation.
Mathurin Petit, Emir Torun, Louis Brusset +2
École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, 91128, France · Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, 10623, Germany · Mines Paris–PSL University, Paris, 75006, France +2
Accurate trajectory prediction can improve General Aviation safety in non-towered terminal airspace, where high traffic density increases accident risk. We present ASCENT, a lightweight transformer-based model for multi-modal 3D aircraft trajectory forecasting, which integrates domain-aware 3D coordinate normalization and parameterized predictions. ASCENT employs a transformer-based motion encoder and a query-based decoder, enabling the generation of diverse maneuver hypotheses with low latency. Experiments on the TrajAir and TartanAviation datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms prior baselines, as the encoder effectively captures motion dynamics and the decoder aligns with structured aircraft traffic patterns. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the contributions of the decoder design, coordinate-frame modeling, and parameterized outputs. These results establish ASCENT as an effective approach for real-time aircraft trajectory prediction in non-towered terminal airspace.
Alexander Prutsch, David Schinagl, Horst Possegger
Institute of Visual Computing, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Greenhouse gas emissions estimates can be derived using inverse methods by combining atmospheric concentration observations with chemical transport models. The latter traditionally use physics-driven simulators such as Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Models (LPDMs), which are expensive to run and do not scale well to modern satellites' high resolution data. Previously we developed a performant atmospheric transport emulator that approximates LPDM outputs ("footprints") over South America ~1,000X faster than the UK Met Office's LPDM. Expanding towards global emulation is not straightforward, as atmospheric transport is regionally heterogeneous. This paper evaluates spatial transferability capabilities of models across four world regions: South America, East Asia, South Asia, North Africa using both region-specific and multi-region models, and leave-one-region-out experiments. Regional differences are characterised in the context of input variable and output footprint distributions. This work builds intuition in cross-region generalisation and transfer learning, aiding regional performance towards efficient global emissions estimates.
Jeff Clark, Elena Fillola, Nawid Keshtmand +2
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol, UK · School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK