Contrails Affect Weather

TheSync writes "Wired News has a story about how contrails may influence the weather. The grounding of commercial flight operations after the 9/11 attack gave scientists a unique opportunity to compare weather with and without contrail-producing flight operations. Day/night temperature differences rose 3 degrees Celsius in some areas."

Comments

RTFA

[Elias Israel]

Yes, it's the ever-present /. cliche. The summary appears to have been written without reference to the underlying article.

This statement:

Day/night temperature differences rose 3 degrees Celsius in some areas...

is completely backwards

From the article

A team of climatologists presented their work Tuesday, showing that temperatures in the United States fluctuated by 1.2 degrees Celsius more when airplanes were grounded than when normal flight patterns prevailed. That is, planes in the sky dampen the variability between day and nighttime temperatures. More air travel, the researchers suggest, brings less meteorological difference between noon and midnight.

Now, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing can certainly be debated, and I expect the very next post in this topic to come from some hopelessly silly GreenPeace activist admonishing us all to stop flying in planes and start hugging dolphins.

But at least let's start the discussion by actually reading the article first.

Is this a good study even?

[Anonymous Coward]

I question this study because I don't know if that's nearly enough data to work on. You'd need a lot longer than a few days of grounded air traffic to test this theory, in my opinion.