Aircraft Condensation Trails Monitoring Service – CONTRAILS

Dates: 2003 - 2005
Partners: EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC), European Space Agency (ESA), German Aerospace Centre (DLR), Royal Netherlands Met Institute (KNMI), Dundee Satellite Receiving Station
Links: CONTRAILS website

The ESA and EEC-funded CONTRAILS Project focused on the development and demonstration of a satellite Earth Observation (EO) service to support the continuous assessment of the environmental effects of increasing volumes of air traffic, by monitoring the daily contrail and cirrus cloud coverage, for one year, over Europe and the North Atlantic.

Contrails were mapped intensively for one year (2004) using several satellite sensors in order to capture the diurnal variation. Cirrus cloud coverage and properties were also mapped using satellite data. By comparing the cirrus cloud maps with air traffic density maps, the relationship between changes in cirrus and air traffic density was quantified. An assessment was made of the radiative forcing of both the contrails and the cirrus changes. Finally, an independent assessment of the EUROCONTROL contrail formation model was made by comparing model-based contrail maps with the satellite derived contrail maps.

ENVISA created a computer model to predict contrail coverage from global aviation to link directly with the global emission model AEM and the weather forecast model MM5. European contrail coverage maps were produced and compared with contrail coverage observed by satellite.