A case study of the radiative forcing of persistent contrails evolving into contrail-induced cirrus

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 114, D24201, doi:10.1029/2009JD012650, 2009

[link to www.met.reading.ac.uk]

The development of the contrail-induced cirrus is tracked using
a number of high-resolution polar orbiting and lower-resolution geostationary satellite
instruments and is found to persist for a period of around 18 h, and at its peak, it covers
over 50,000 km2. The shortwave (SW) and longwave (LW) radiative forcing of the
contrail-induced cirrus is estimated using a combination of geostationary satellite
instruments, numerical weather prediction models, and surface observation sites.

A single aircraft operating in conditions favorable for persistent
contrail formation appears to exert a contrail-induced radiative forcing some 5000 times
greater (in W m2 km1) than recent estimates of the average persistent contrail
radiative forcing from the entire civil aviation fleet.




:Chemtrail Time L:



[46] This work indicates that a confident assessment of
the total effect of aviation on climate, and the efficacy of
possible mitigation options (for example, changing flight
routing or altitudes to avoid contrail formation, with the
possibility that CO2 which has a radically longer lifetime
will increase as a result) is heavily dependent on reducing
the uncertainty in the size of the contrail-induced radiative forcing.