The climate impact of COVID-19-induced contrail changes

Gettelman, Andrew; Chen, Chieh-Chieh; Bardeen, Charles G.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9405-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9405-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9405-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

Research article

|

18 Jun 2021

Research article |

| 18 Jun 2021

The climate impact of COVID-19-induced contrail changes

Andrew Gettelman, Chieh-Chieh Chen, and Charles G. Bardeen

Data sets

Simulations of Contrails Under COVID-19 Effects Andrew Gettelman https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4584078

Model code and software

Model Code for Simulations of Contrail COVID-19 Effects Andrew Gettelman https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4584078

CAM: The Community Atmosphere Model ESCOMP https://github.com/ESCOMP/CAM/tree/cam6_2_022

Short summary

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant economic disruption in 2020 and severely impacted air traffic. We use a climate model to evaluate the effect of the reductions in aviation on climate in 2020. Contrails, in general, warm the planet, and COVID-19-related reductions in contrails cooled the land surface in 2020. The timing of reductions in aviation was important, and this may change how we think about the future effects of contrails.