Articles | Volume 18, issue 14
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
28 Jul 2025
Research article |
| 28 Jul 2025
| 28 Jul 2025
Benchmarking and improving algorithms for attributing satellite-observed contrails to flights
Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
Vincent Meijer
Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
Rémi Chevallier
Federation ENAC ISAE SUPAERO ONERA, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France
Allie Duncan
Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
Kyle McConnaughay
formerly at: Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
Scott Geraedts
Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
Kevin McCloskey
Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
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Aaron Sonabend-W, Scott Geraedts, Nita Goyal, Joe Yue-Hei Ng, Christopher Van Arsdale, and Kevin McCloskey
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3739, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3739, 2025
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (AMT).
Short summary
Short summary
Airplane condensation trails trap heat, but the full warming effect has been hard to measure with satellites as they quickly blend with natural cirrus clouds. Our new method isolates their long-lived impact, estimating the effect of flight paths on satellite measurements of heat leaving the Earth. We found contrails trapped 46.9 gigajoules of heat per kilometer flown over the Americas, providing a crucially missing observation-based estimate of a large portion of aviation's environmental impact.
Katarina Grubbe Hildebrandt, Federica Castino, Vincent Meijer, and Feijia Yin
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3048, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3048, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
We evaluate the regional and seasonal variability in the prediction of ice supersaturated region (ISSRS) in the ERA5 reanalysis using in situ measurements. ERA5 shows better ability to predict ISSRs in the extratropics, compared to the tropics, and in colder seasons, such as extratropical winter. While ERA5 generally underestimates the ISSR occurrence, we find an overestimation in tropical regions in seasons associated larger weather variability, such as South Asia in June, July and August.
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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.
Contrails, the clouds formed by aircraft, are have a substantial climate impact. Determining...
