Page 1 of 1

Contrail lobes

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 8:19 pm
by Greg Gruner
There was an interesting article on contrail lobes in the August edition of "Weather".
Interestingly, I came across a pronounced example of contrail lobes yesterday, while walking the dog at 1832 BST, and managed to take a photo, which I will attempt to attached.
The photograph was taken looking in a SW direction, and the contrail was oriented NW-SE. There must have been a strong SW-NE jet stream, because when I took the photo the contrail was less than 45deg elevation; within around 2-3 minutes it was directly overhead (carried "sideways" by the strong wind). A quick calculation would indicate that if the height was around 25,000 feet, the wind speed would have been >100mph.
Contrail lobes
Contrail lobes
contrail.JPG (33.77 KiB) Viewed 11429 times

Re: Contrail lobes

Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 2:00 pm
by Martin Rowley
... thanks for posting that image: every time I see these 'lobes' I'm captivated by the apparent complexity of exactly how they form. The article you mention gives a creditable mechanism - but I wonder how many looking upwards on a fine day realise just how 'dynamic' is the atmosphere around these features.

Martin.