Map von Contrails.org

This map makes the issue of contrail mitigation more tangible: not every flight produces persistent contrails. And not every contrail has the same climate impact. What matters are specific weather conditions at specific altitudes — especially very cold and humid air layers in which contrails can spread and persist.

The map embedded here is provided by Contrails.org. We are grateful to Contrails.org for allowing us to show it on this page. It helps make the topic easier to understand. It shows that contrails are not an abstract side issue, but something that can occur in very specific places and time windows. That is also where the opportunity lies: if particularly critical regions can be predicted more reliably, flight routes can often be adjusted — sometimes by only a few hundred metres in altitude.

It is important to note that this map is not a tool for making final judgments about individual flights. It visualises conditions, probabilities and available data. But it clearly illustrates why contrail mitigation is possible in the first place: because the problem does not occur everywhere, all the time, or with the same intensity.