ECATS Conference

The E-CONTRAIL project presented its progress in tackling the environmental challenges of aviation at the 4th European Conference for Aviation and the Environment (ECATS). 

The presentation was conducted by Hugues Brenot from the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, and titled "The Covariance-Based Retrieval Algorithm for contrails detection using geostationary imagers".

It highlighted E-CONTRAIL's innovative approach to contrail detection and its potential climate impact. The conclusions and future plan of the project include the use of the detection algorithm (COBRA + RGB deep learning) for:

1. Defining aviation contrails detection
2. Contrail tracking with flight ID & trajectory
3. Ratio of contrail detection algorithm with the corresponding Radiative Forcing
4. AI prediction/forecasts of contrail formation
5. Archive production of contrail detection & evaluation of Radiative Forcing (demo dashboard)

The idea behind the project is to provide a forecast 24h ahead of time with the volumes of airspace (including geolocation and altitude) that are expected to largely contribute to the climate impact if the aircraft overflies these regions.