Description: Weather and climate blog, making sense of how the atmosphere influences our everyday lives.
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Millions of passengers criss-cross the Earth’s skies each day in huge metal tubes, punching through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour. You might expect all these planes to make an effect on our atmosphere, and in particular, our clouds. Planes can alter the cloudscape in a number of different ways: some common; others rare and precious to cloud spotters.
When hot, moist exhaust gases leave planes, in the right conditions, the water vapour can condense, leaving long thin wakes. These are essentially artificial clouds, made of nothing but water droplets, produced by the same adiabatic processes which form natural clouds. The exhaust from the plane engine is a much higher temperature than the surroundings, and because colder air can hold less water vapour, it must condense into fluffy trails.