Articles | Volume 21, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-1649-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-1649-2021
Research article
 | 
09 Feb 2021
Research article |  | 09 Feb 2021

Impacts of multi-layer overlap on contrail radiative forcing

Inés Sanz-Morère, Sebastian D. Eastham, Florian Allroggen, Raymond L. Speth, and Steven R. H. Barrett

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Cited articles

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Short summary
Contrails cause ~50 % of aviation climate impacts, but this is highly uncertain. This is partly due to the effect of overlap between contrails and other cloud layers. We developed a model to quantify this effect, finding that overlap with natural clouds increased contrails' radiative forcing in 2015. This suggests that cloud avoidance may help in reducing aviation's climate impacts. We also find that contrail–contrail overlap reduces impacts by ~3 %, increasing non-linearly with optical depth.
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