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Study: Jet Exhaust Affects Weather

Posted by michael on from the messing-with-mother-earth dept.

An anonymous submitter writes: "Warp 10 speeds may affect... Ooops, wrong story.. Apparently, jets are affecting the weather and contributing to about a 3 degree daily temperature variation. Even a single degree variation in overall temperature (climate) is significant, but I'm not certain how significant is 3 degrees in local temperatures." We mentioned this before - there was a Wired story - but now their work has been published in Nature and the AP has picked up the story.

6 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Weather, not climate by JanneM · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is interesting, but remember that this affects weather (short-term variations over a restricted area), not climate (long-term trends on a large scale). As another poster pointed out, cities and other urban development does the same thing.

    More worriesome is that jet exhaust probably contributes proportionally more to the greenhouse effect than the amount of pollutants realeased would indicate, as it tends to be dumped high up, resulting in more greenhous gases ending up in the ozone layer than it would have had it been burned close to the ground.

    /Janne

    --
    Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  2. Re:Small Statistical Sample by girouette · · Score: 2, Informative

    This has nothing to do with global warming, and everything to do with measuring the local effect of aircraft-induced cirrus cloud. There was a three-day window when there was no such 'artificial' cirrus being produced. If you consider the space and time scale of the physical processes being looked at (a few hours to a day), I think this is not as bad as you are trying to make it sound.

  3. Re:Four days? by dragons_flight · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hmmmm, well if the ocean level continues to change at ~2 mm / yr, then it will only take 1,200 years before the water goes up enough to cover the Miami airport at 8 feet above sea level.

  4. Read the Abstract by bellings · · Score: 4, Informative

    When slashdot selected the same story just three short days ago, they also linked to an NPR story and a blurb on the nature website.

    I'll one more, very important, link to the mix. You can read the abstract for free. Reading the paper itself is not free, unless you count going to your local university library for the dead tree copy as free. Before anyone else comments on the science behind this, please at least read the abstract, and hopefully have the knowledge to pass at least one introductory statistics course.

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    Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
  5. As usual, no one reads the article by andyring · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read the article people! That 3-degree variation ended up LOWERING the temperature by 3 degress on account of air traffic, not raising it. So, if we're all worried about global warming, fly more!

  6. NASA contrail images by ckedge · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can't seem to find it now, but I've seen a NASA picture (super high res color) of the Eastern Seaboard that was just COVERED with contrails.

    Here's everything that I can find in 5 minutes, it comes close to showing what I saw once. (I swear it was from the Terra satelite, but I can't find it right now)

    http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail .htm

    http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?28 69

    http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail s040595a.gif

    http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?53 46

    http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?47 43

    Ships put out an amazing amount of water vapour, and photos of the Western Seaboard have shown huge numbers of ship generated cloud banks off of San Francisco. Here's one example:

    http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11 335