Help me to understand - Photos and Videos with very large numbers of contrails

[Ross Marsden]

The topic is this photo and video. Not contrails in general.

Erm... I think the topic is photos or videos (in general) of large numbers of contrails. Well, that's what the title says, together with an appeal for help to understand how there comes to be scenes like this such large numbers of contrails.

What makes it astounding is just the visual impact of so many.

If there was no air traffic there would be none at all. If one plane flew over there would be one. And so on. The numbers are not the intellectual problem. It's easy to understand that.
The difficulty (for most) is, "What condition of the sky or atmosphere causes this to happen for any one of those planes, and today, all of them?"
And then the discussion moves to talking about contrail formation and their evolution in general.

 

[Mick West]

Sorry, I edited the title, it was originally "Help me understand" and referred to one particular image (in the OP), then the source video of this image turned up. Then Joe started to enthusiastically explain how it was obviously geoengineering, which was the point I had to delete a few posts.

 

[WeedWhacker]

Planes from Frankfurt (FRA) and Munich going to East and Mid U.S. will usually fly over Belgium. Don't have the numbers ready yet, but that must amount to quite a lot. And that's just two airports.

Yes, also many intra-Europe with generally North/South direction.

That "dreaded" SkyVector link (centered on Brussels, this time).

Pretty easy to get the gist...the blue and black lines are the Airway routes ("highways" in the sky). They each have a designated alpha-numeric number for identification.

In that part of Europe, you can see that some of those routes are 'one-way', because of the arrows. Of course, in the vertical sense you can have many airplanes on just one route, vertically separated by 1,000 feet, and each could (when conditions are suitable) produce individual and persistent contrails that linger, and would appear in the pattern seen in the OP photo.

 

[jonnyH]

Ya that link is like chinese to me. Way over my head.

Pun intended?

 

[JFDee]

If anybody living in Belgium reads this - it would be quite interesting and informative to have a time-lapse video from such a 'trail day'.

Like this one from Amsterdam:

BTW, this example shows how two or three plane routes (like the ones from the SkyVector charts) are enough to create a large-area grid - in combination with a steady wind (see second half of video).

Always worth referring to is the trail grid simulator that Mick has created:
http://contrailscience.com/contrail-simulations

 

[Liz]

If anybody living in Belgium reads this - it would be quite interesting and informative to have a time-lapse video from such a 'trail day'.

Like this one from Amsterdam:

BTW, this example shows how two or three plane routes (like the ones from the SkyVector charts) are enough to create a large-area grid - in combination with a steady wind (see second half of video).

Always worth referring to is the trail grid simulator that Mick has created:
http://contrailscience.com/contrail-simulations

I live in Belgium, what exactly do u need ?

 

[Liz]

There's a new chemtrail believer bye the way who is from Belgium . A pilot who lives in Germany now called Marc Junker . He hasn't been debunked yet, can't find him on this site anyway..

 

[JDubyah]

Do you think anything can be done to make them go away faster? I just wanna see the sky and not all the contrails.

This is a little late, but there's a lot of talk about reducing contrails. One of them was mentioned in a BBC article a little while ago, and it's a simple approach.. changing flight paths so that they're less likely to form contrails. Flights might get a little longer, but there might be less 'contrail pollution' as a result:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27907399

 

[deirdre]

This is a little late, but there's a lot of talk about reducing contrails. One of them was mentioned in a BBC article a little while ago, and it's a simple approach.. changing flight paths so that they're less likely to form contrails. Flights might get a little longer, but there might be less 'contrail pollution' as a result:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27907399

the pollution is there regardless. passengers are never going to go for that. I know I'm not paying a "humidity fee" for xtra gas cause some yokel doesn't want to move from under a flight path.

 

[JDubyah]

the pollution is there regardless. passengers are never going to go for that. I know I'm not paying a "humidity fee" for xtra gas cause some yokel doesn't want to move from under a flight path.

I had meant 'contrail pollution' in the same way as 'noise pollution' - meaning, less visual pollution of the appearance of the skies for people who, understandably, just don't like the way it looks.. like the poster I was replying to. So less eye-pollution of seeing white trails in the sky, rather than less exhaust pollution. I should have been clearer.

Does a contrail itself contain as much pollution as the exhaust itself? I know some of the particulates in the exhaust are the condensation nuclei for the the vapor an ice that forms a contrail, but I don't know how much remains in the white cloud of a contrail after it forms, and how much pollution goes elsewhere, less visibly. I always thought of the contrail that forms to be a subset of the exhaust, and not the superset.

 

[deirdre]

I had meant 'contrail pollution' in the same way as 'noise pollution' - meaning, less visual pollution of the appearance of the skies for people who, understandably, just don't like the way it looks.. like the poster I was replying to. So less eye-pollution of seeing white trails in the sky, rather than less exhaust pollution. I should have been clearer.

Does a contrail itself contain as much pollution as the exhaust itself? I know some of the particulates in the exhaust are the condensation nuclei for the the vapor an ice that forms a contrail, but I don't know how much remains in the white cloud of a contrail after it forms, and how much pollution goes elsewhere, less visibly. I always thought of the contrail that forms to be a subset of the exhaust, and not the superset.

yes I know what you meant. I was just clarifying for other readers as chemmeis
would love to read an idea like that and run with it. sorry for the misunderstanding.

 

[Trailblazer]

I had meant 'contrail pollution' in the same way as 'noise pollution' - meaning, less visual pollution of the appearance of the skies for people who, understandably, just don't like the way it looks.. like the poster I was replying to. So less eye-pollution of seeing white trails in the sky, rather than less exhaust pollution. I should have been clearer.

Does a contrail itself contain as much pollution as the exhaust itself? I know some of the particulates in the exhaust are the condensation nuclei for the the vapor an ice that forms a contrail, but I don't know how much remains in the white cloud of a contrail after it forms, and how much pollution goes elsewhere, less visibly. I always thought of the contrail that forms to be a subset of the exhaust, and not the superset.

A persistent contrail is almost entirely ice that has crystallised out of the air, from water vapour that was already present. Maybe about 1 part in 10,000 or less is water from the exhaust.

And out of that 1 part in 10,000, much less than 1% of THAT is solid "pollutants". Virtually all of the exhaust is either carbon dioxide (a gas which is a greenhouse gas, but will not be concentrated in the contrail as it will quickly disperse) or water.

If you could collect the ice particles in a persistent contrail and melt them down into liquid water, you'd end up with pretty pure water.

 

[Jay Reynolds]

Skystef takes contrail and aircraft photography from just north of Brussels. He has a large and ever increasing number of excellent telephoto images of the planes he finds making contrails, even at altitudes of 40,000 ft he is able to get discernable plane numbers which can be confirmed by flight tracking and schedules to be ordinary jet airliners.

http://www.skystef.be/contrail.htm

There is also a growing community of "contrail-spotters" worldwide who actively do the same on a daily basis as a hobby.
They post their work here at a Belgian based site:
http://www.luchtzak.be/forums/viewforum.php?f=25

Thus it can be seen that there are no mysteries here. The planes fly openly and well marked if only you use the correct technology to identify them for what they really are.

here is an example taken from Sint-Truiden, Belgium 3 November

http://www.luchtzak.be/forums/viewt...&sid=f75c7920067c06d4401946f9338abd56#p308608