United States Department of Transportation
i
A Scalable System to Measure Contrail Formation on a Per-Flight Basis
-
2024-01-01
-
[PDF-1.06 MB]
Details:
-
Creators:
-
Corporate Creators:
-
Corporate Contributors:
-
Subject/TRT Terms:
-
Publication/ Report Number:
-
DOI:
-
Resource Type:
-
Right Statement:
-
Geographical Coverage:
-
Corporate Publisher:
-
Abstract:Persistent contrails make up a large fraction of aviationʼs contribution to global warming. We describe a scalable, automated detection and matching (ADM) system to determine from satellite data whether a flight has made a persistent contrail. The ADM system compares flight segments to contrails detected by a computer vision algorithm running on images from the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager. We develop a flight matching algorithm and use it to label each flight segment as a match or non-match. We perform this analysis on 1.6 million flight segments. The result is an analysis of which flights make persistent contrails several orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We assess the agreement between our labels and available prediction models based on weather forecasts. Shifting air traffic to avoid regions of contrail formation has been proposed as a possible mitigation with the potential for very low cost/ton-CO2e. Our findings suggest that imperfections in these prediction models increase this cost/ton by about an order of magnitude. Contrail avoidance is a cost-effective climate change mitigation even with this factor taken into account, but our results quantify the need for more accurate contrail prediction methods and establish a benchmark for future development.
-
Content Notes:This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Please cite this article as: Geraedts, Scott & Brand, Erica & Dean, Thomas & Eastham, Sebastian & Elkin, Carl & Engberg, Zebediah & Hager, Ulrike & Langmore, Ian & McCloskey, Kevin & Ng, Joe & Platt, John & Sankar, Tharun & Sarna, Aaron & Shapiro, Marc & Goyal, Nita. (2024). A scalable system to measure contrail formation on a per-?ight basis. Environmental Research Communications. 6. 10.1088/2515-7620/ad11ab.
-
Format:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
