Airplanes May Affect Weather Patterns

blankmange writes "Wired is carrying an interesting piece: '...for three days starting last Sept. 11, meteorological researchers were presented with just such an opportunity when the FAA grounded commercial flights nationwide for three days following the terrorist air attacks. And now it has emerged that the American climate was indeed noticeably different during those three days without air travel.' Seems that what we do on the planet may have more effect than we may ever know."

Comments

More data?

[Debillitatus]

Of course, I'm sure my fellow /.ers are posting about the paucity of data in this sample. So, I won't worry about the fact that we can't derive too much useful information from this.

OTOH, I imagine that the air traffic, in, say, the US varies quite a bit from day-to-day. For example, the day before Tgiving is berzerk, and there's probably some days where noone travels. Anyway, one way to get more data on this theory would be to correlate, over a long time, the cloud (or whatever) variables with the number of planes in the air. Do this every day for about a year, and see what you get.

One thing to note is that although these three days are not much data, it's actually very strong, in the sense that nothing flew those days. So it's the strongest data you could get over any three-day period. I'm sure we'll see more stuff coming out soon.