Airtrail
On clear or partly sunny days, people might look up at the sky and see straight lines of what appear to be clouds or white smoke. These lines are not smoke or natural clouds; they are contrails produced by aircraft. Contrails form because water vapor from jet engine exhaust passes through a cold and humid part of the air at high altitudes. Sometimes the jet that created the contrails is not visible overhead because winds aloft have blown the vapor trail into the observed area after the jet has passed. Naturally occurring high thin cirrus clouds do not form straight lines, they are more diffuse and irregular in shape than a contrail. Can an app be developed to help a ground observer determine the probability that an aircraft made the thin lines of white 'clouds' overhead?
The aeronautical 'Clouds or Contrail' challenge asked participants to give the approximate location of the user on the ground and the approximate location of the possible contrail above.
Contrails are clouds formed when water vapor condenses and freezes around small particles (aerosols) that exist in aircraft exhaust. Some of that water vapor comes from the air around the plane; and, some is added by the exhaust of the aircraft. The exhaust of an aircraft contains both gas (vapor) and solid particles.
With this in mind we used commercial flight data API's, weather data API's and satellite imagery to track the contrail data to the flight data and used the Appleman chart as reference for our plotting.
Our target audience are atmospheric and climate scientists as well as air traffic managers.
The Airtrail team consisted of:
Emma Phiri
Ntombi Masango
Roxanne Davids
Github link: https://github.com/R2D2-12/spaceapps_airtrail
