A Typical Contrail Day by Jeff Prager On an average day, air traffic controllers handle 28,537 commercial flights (major and regional airlines), 27,178 general aviation flights (private planes), 24,548 air taxi flights (planes for hire), 5,260 military flights and 2,148 air cargo flights (Federal Express, UPS, etc.). At any given moment, right this very moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States. Each day controllers handle an average of 87,671 flights over the United States. Heres a satellite image [1] showing a typical day of contrail flight paths across the central portion of the United States. The image shows highly persistent contrails from national and international flights coming and going above the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and into Alabama but it only shows 300 or 400 contrails of a potential 87,671. Some of the contrails are still thin. Some have widened and formed into hazier and wider lines. Some have banded together and formed wide hazes. Some start and stop because we can see that air temperature changed and they cant persist. We can actually see the bands of warmer air where contrails disappear rapidly. And we can see all of the northern-most states are covered by a warm front preventing contrails completely. We even see all sorts of criss-cross contrails based on various flight paths created by east/west and north/south flights. In one year, controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and landings. Everyone sees contrails. Because any aerosol sprayed into the atmosphere dissipates quickly, a chemical sprayed out of an aircraft would disappear as it was dispersed by the wind. Heres a video [2], just 5 or 6 seconds long, of 12-hours of global cloud movement so you can see just how the global wind currents move across the earth in a 12-hour period. Chemicals sprayed out of aircraft would be dispersed by the wind. Only contrails, that hold moisture, create clouds in the sky. Chemtrails formed by experiments where aerosols are released into the atmosphere are far more infrequent than you might think although we know from the scientific literature that atmospheric testing is something weve been doing for decades. Yet aerosols sprayed in the atmosphere dont linger and form clouds. Contrails linger and form clouds. Its a moisture thing. Todays contrails form a haze over a period of time and then move on with the wind currents and tomorrows contrails, all 87,000 of them, do it again. There are a lot of contrail potentials every single day, 87,000 of them. References: 1. NASA Earth Observatory, Aircraft Contrails: eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/4000/4435/contrails_southeast_lrg.gif 2. NASA, LARC, VISST Cloud Product Page: www-pm.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/site/showdoc?docid=22&domain=gw_fd&lkdomain=Y
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 21:55:56 +0000
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