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I am working on a data visualisation of airline flight paths and their probability of forming contrails.

Given weather data for a specific area (location, time, temperature, pressure and humidity) and aircraft data (location, time, altitude, speed and engine efficiency)

Is there an equation that will give me a rough estimate of the probability contrails will form at this point?

Red Panda
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1 Answers1

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Schmidt-Appleman criterion (SAC) is used to model contrail formation. I advise reading in full Ulrich Schumann's article "A contrail cirrus prediction model" (http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/5/543/2012/gmd-5-543-2012.pdf) to get all the relevant formulae and literature references.

While it is possible to transcribe the formulae here, the reference cited does a better job of presenting state of the art (2012).

Deer Hunter
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