The impact of contrails on Earth’s climate is probably not negligible, yet there are only a few initiatives aimed at mitigating the influence of aviation on the environment. To achieve zero CO2 emissions, aircraft manufacturers and airlines propose complex and costly methods and technologies such as synthetic fuels, hybrid engines, or expensive carbon offsetting. On the other hand, contrail mitigation by achievable operational measures has the potential to achieve benefits with a very positive cost-benefit ratio without the need for a complex technological change in aviation. It seems that one suitable tool for contrail mitigation is the change in flight level. Therefore, we focused on the assessment of flight levels with typical contrails occurrence and common flight levels used by air traffic management. Some influence of tropopause height throughout the year was presumed to be a factor, therefore we studied different times of the year. The tropopause height influences not only contrail occurrence but also the preferred flight level, as airlines tend to avoid flying directly in the tropopause. We present some basic statistics about the frequency of contrail occurrence based on flight level. We focused on long-lived contrails to emphasize the more important contrails in this context. Information about flight levels is based on ADS-B data transmitted by aircraft and recorded by a ground station near the place of contrail occurrence, which was based on optical survey.

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In an industry beset by economic and environmental crises, air transport, the safest and most efficient long-haul mode of transport, is confronted daily with multi-criteria challenges to improve its environmental performance. The formation of contrails through the emission of water vapor and condensation nuclei in what are actually dry and clean atmospheric layers represents one of the most unpredictable, or measurable, environmental impacts of air traffic. Following the bottom-up principle to evaluate individual contrails in order to derive recommendations for trajectory optimization, not only the calculation of the radiative forcing of the contrails but also the modeling of their life cycle is burdened with uncertainties. In former studies for modeling the microphysical life cycle of contrails based on a 3-D Gaussian plume model, the atmospheric conditions, specifically the turbulence, were often unknown and had to be considered as a free input variable. In this study, an innovative photographic method for identifying and tracking contrails in Central Europe, connected with database access to Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast (ADS-B) data (i.e., aircraft type, speed, altitude, track, etc.), and a combination of measured and modeled weather data are used to validate the contrail life-cycle model (i.e., the assumed Gaussian plume behavior). We found that it is challenging to model the position of ice-supersaturated layers with global forecast models, but they have the most significant impact on the contrail lifetime. On average, the contrail’s lifespan could be modeled with an error margin of 10%. Sometimes, we slightly underestimated the lifetime. With the validated and plausible contrail life-cycle model, we can apply the climate effectiveness of individual contrails with higher certainty in trajectory optimization and compare it, for example, with economic aspects such as delay costs or fuel costs.

This article describes the causes and behavior of aircraft condensation trails, aircraft radar technology, communication between aircraft and ground control stations, description of the function, analysis and processing of the ADS-B receivers and registers data. It also deals with the design and creation of a suitable web application with a simple user interface and a database for storing and processing this data. The work was based mainly on academical materials and sources, focusing on the issue of condensation trails, ADS-B functionality and programming of web applications.