Au contrail
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?
Is that a cloud? Au contrail !
Our Android app is your guide to the world of contrails. Simply point you phone to the sky and find out if it is a natural or a man-made cloud.
We use real-time image processing to recognize could shapes that look man-made (mostly straight lines), and correlate the data with information about commercial flights that passed over the area recently. If we find a match we show to the user data about the aircraft that created the contrail.
If confident about the result, a user can submit the observation. The image of the contrail together with information about the flight and the atmospheric conditions are stored in a database and can be used in other research projects in the field on contrails, like using it as test data for a machine learning algorithm.
