Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

Contrail coverage over the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

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dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
dc.creator Meijer, Vincent R
dc.creator Kulik, Luke
dc.creator Eastham, Sebastian D
dc.creator Allroggen, Florian
dc.creator Speth, Raymond L
dc.creator Karaman, Sertac
dc.creator Barrett, Steven RH
dc.date 2022-09-07T15:24:02Z
dc.date 2022-09-07T15:24:02Z
dc.date 2022
dc.date 2022-09-07T15:20:01Z
dc.date.accessioned 2023-02-17T20:20:53Z
dc.date.available 2023-02-17T20:20:53Z
dc.identifier https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145277
dc.identifier Meijer, Vincent R, Kulik, Luke, Eastham, Sebastian D, Allroggen, Florian, Speth, Raymond L et al. 2022. "Contrail coverage over the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic." Environmental Research Letters, 17 (3).
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/242534
dc.description <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Contrails are potentially the largest contributor to aviation-attributable climate change, but estimates of their coverage are highly uncertain. No study has provided observation-based continental-scale estimates of the diurnal, seasonal, and regional variability in contrail coverage. We present contrail coverage estimates for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 for the contiguous United States, derived by developing and applying a deep learning algorithm to over 100 000 satellite images. We estimate that contrails covered an area the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined in the years 2018 and 2019. Comparing 2019 and 2020, we quantify a 35.8% reduction in distance flown above 8 km altitude and an associated reduction in contrail coverage of 22.3%. We also find that the diurnal pattern in contrail coverage aligns with that of flight traffic, but that the amount of contrail coverage per distance flown decreases in the afternoon.</jats:p>
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language en
dc.publisher IOP Publishing
dc.relation 10.1088/1748-9326/AC26F0
dc.relation Environmental Research Letters
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
dc.rights https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.source IOP Publishing
dc.title Contrail coverage over the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
dc.type Article
dc.type http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle


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