Angelica Stewart
MIT Department: Aeronautics and Astronautics
Faculty Mentor: Prashanth Prakash
Undergraduate Institution: Howard University
Hometown: Portmore, Jamaica
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Angelica Stewart is a Barry Goldwater Scholar at Howard University majoring in Computer Science. Her career goal is to use computer science as a tool to tackle the climate crisis and teach at the university level. She is currently working on developing version 3 of the Aviation Emissions Inventory Code (AEIC) in the Lab for Aviation and the Environment (LAE) in the AeroAstro Department. Angelica previously interned in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and at NASA. She is also an undergraduate researcher at @fterlab, where she develops computational tools for a drone-sensor system. Angelica is the president of Howard’s Society of Women Engineers and a member of Tau Beta Pi. She founded The College Connect International, a nonprofit aimed at improving educational opportunities in developing countries. In her leisure time, Angelica enjoys reading, running, playing board games, and spending time with friends and family.
Abstract
Improving Global Aviation Emissions Modeling for Climate and Air
Quality Impact Assessments
Angelica Stewart¹, Wyatt Giroux², and Prakash Prashanth²
¹Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Howard University
²Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Understanding the variations in air quality and climate health is crucial due to their direct impact on human health and planetary well-being. The environmental impact of aviation is influenced by both
long-term CO₂ emissions and various non-CO₂ emissions, which can have both immediate and lasting effects. From 1960 to 2018, global aviation CO₂ emissions grew at an average rate of 15 Tg CO₂ per year, with a sharp increase to 44 Tg CO₂ per year from 2013 to 2018, reaching over 1000 million tonnes in 2018, constituting approximately 2.4% of total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions (Lee et al., 2021). This highlights the substantial and growing impact of aviation on global climate forcing and air quality, necessitating continued research and policy focus on mitigating these aviation induced effects. The Aviation Emissions Inventory Code (AEIC) was developed in 2011 using MATLAB to model commercial aviation emissions, leveraging MATLAB’s strong data processing capabilities. However, the current tool faces challenges due to its complex user interface and cumbersome maintenance requirements, as well as the restrictive nature of MATLAB’s proprietary framework. To address these issues, we are not only transitioning to Python, an open-source platform, but also implementing software engineering best practices to improve the inventory’s usability, extendability, and modularity. Additionally, we are optimizing the data pipeline by strategically selecting data structures and leveraging Python’s flexible ecosystem. By using these techniques and resources to refactor the data pipeline, we will enhance computational efficiency. These improvements in AEIC will enable more efficient modeling of aviation emissions, helping the industry reduce its carbon footprint while also contributing to global efforts to enhance air quality and combat climate change, ultimately promoting a healthier and more sustainable planet.
D. S. Lee et al., “The Contribution of Global Aviation to Anthropogenic Climate Forcing for 2000 to 2018,” Atmospheric Environment, vol. 244, p. 117834, 2021.
