Articles | Volume 18, issue 14
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025
Research article
 | 
28 Jul 2025
Research article |  | 28 Jul 2025

Benchmarking and improving algorithms for attributing satellite-observed contrails to flights

Aaron Sarna, Vincent Meijer, Rémi Chevallier, Allie Duncan, Kyle McConnaughay, Scott Geraedts, and Kevin McCloskey

Data sets

ERA5 hourly data on pressure levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.bd0915c6

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Short summary
Contrails, the clouds formed by aircraft, are have a substantial climate impact. Determining which flight formed each contrail is a critical step to decreasing this impact. We introduce a dataset of synthetic contrail observations with known flight attributions that can be used to develop and assess geostationary-satellite-based contrail-to-flight attribution systems. We additionally introduce a new attribution algorithm and show that it outperforms previous methods.
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