Articles | Volume 19, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-19-1951-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-19-1951-2026
Research article
 | 
18 Mar 2026
Research article |  | 18 Mar 2026

Observing long-lived longwave contrail forcing

Aaron Sonabend-W, Scott Geraedts, Nita Goyal, Joe Yue-Hei Ng, Christopher Van Arsdale, and Kevin McCloskey

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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
Atmos. Meas. Tech., 18, 3495–3532, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025,https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-3495-2025, 2025
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Cited articles

Abrevaya, J., Hsu, Y.-C., and Lieli, R. P.: Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects, J. Bus. Econ. Stat., 33, 485–505, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350015.2014.975555, 2015. a
Agarwal, A., Meijer, V. R., Eastham, S. D., Speth, R. L., and Barrett, S. R.: 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
Akhtar Martínez, C., Eastham, S. D., and Jarrett, J. P.: Zero-dimensional contrail models could underpredict lifetime optical depth, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 25, 12875–12891, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-12875-2025, 2025. a
Bickel, M., Ponater, M., Bock, L., Burkhardt, U., and Reineke, S.: Estimating the effective radiative forcing of contrail cirrus, J. Climate, 33, 1991–2005, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0467.1, 2020. a
Bickel, M., Ponater, M., Burkhardt, U., Righi, M., Hendricks, J., and Jöckel, P.: Contrail Cirrus Climate Impact: From Radiative Forcing to Surface Temperature Change, J. Climate, 38, 1895–1912, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-24-0245.1, 2025. a
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Short summary
Airplane condensation trails trap heat, but their full warming effect is hard to measure because they blend into natural clouds. Using satellite observations, weather data, flight paths, and a causal inference framework, we isolated this effect without simulations or contrail masks. We found contrails trap 46.9 gigajoules of heat per kilometer flown over the Americas. This provides a crucially missing observation-based estimate of a major portion of aviation’s environmental impact.
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