Aviation contrail climate effects in the North Atlantic from 2016 to 2021

Teoh, Roger; Schumann, Ulrich; Gryspeerdt, Edward; Shapiro, Marc; Molloy, Jarlath; Koudis, George; Voigt, Christiane; Stettler, Marc E. J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-10919-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 16

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-10919-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-10919-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 16

Research article

|

29 Aug 2022

Research article |

| 29 Aug 2022

Aviation contrail climate effects in the North Atlantic from 2016 to 2021

Roger Teoh, Ulrich Schumann, Edward Gryspeerdt, Marc Shapiro, Jarlath Molloy, George Koudis, Christiane Voigt, and Marc E. J. Stettler

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-10919-2022-supplement

Data sets

IAGOS Time series, In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System D. Boulanger, R. Blot, U. Bundke, C. Gerbig, M. Hermann, P. Nédélec, S. Rohs, and H. Ziereis https://doi.org/10.25326/06

IAGOS Data Protal D. Boulanger, V. Thouret, and A. Petzold https://doi.org/10.25326/20

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Short summary

Aircraft condensation trails (contrails) contribute to over half of the climate forcing attributable to aviation. This study uses historical air traffic and weather data to simulate contrails in the North Atlantic over 5 years, from 2016 to 2021. We found large intra- and inter-year variability in contrail radiative forcing and observed a 66 % reduction due to COVID-19. Most warming contrails predominantly result from night-time flights in winter.