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

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This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP).
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Cited articles

Agarwal, A., Meijer, V. R., Eastham, S. D., Speth, R. L., and Barrett, S. R. H.: Reanalysis-driven simulations may overestimate persistent contrail formation by 100 %–250 %, Environ. Res. Lett., 17, 014045, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac38d9, 2022. a, b, c, d
Akenine-Moller, T., Haines, E., and Hoffman, N.: Real-time rendering, AK Peters/crc Press, https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315365459, 2019. a
Akidau, T., Bradshaw, R., Chambers, C., Chernyak, S., Fernández-Moctezuma, R. J., Lax, R., McVeety, S., Mills, D., Perry, F., Schmidt, E., and Whittle, S.: The dataflow model: a practical approach to balancing correctness, latency, and cost in massive-scale, unbounded, out-of-order data processing, Proc. VLDB Endow., 8, 1792–1803, https://doi.org/10.14778/2824032.2824076, 2015. a
Apache Software Foundation: Apache Beam: An advanced unified programming model, https://beam.apache.org/documentation/programming-guide/ (last access: 6 September), 2024. a
Beer, A.: Bestimmung der Absorption des rothen Lichts in farbigen Flüssigkeiten, Ann. Phys., 162, 78–88, https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.18521620505, 1852. a, b
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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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