Showcasing E-CONTRAIL 2 Research at the SESAR Green Deal Flagship Workshop
On 13 October 2026, the SESAR E-CONTRAIL 2 project participated in the Green Deal Flagship Workshop at the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (SJU) premises in Brussels, joining stakeholders and researchers to exchange knowledge on innovative solutions supporting more sustainable aviation.
During the Non-CO₂ Solutions Showcase, held from 10:45 to 11:40, the project presented its approach to understanding and quantifying the climate impact of aircraft contrails. Later in the day, from 13:50 to 14:20, the team took part in the Group 2 poster presentations and discussions, sharing the project’s objectives, methodology and expected outcomes.
Advancing contrail detection and climate impact assessment
Aircraft contrails are an important contributor to aviation’s non-CO₂ climate effects, yet their climate impact remains highly uncertain. E-CONTRAIL 2 aims to address this challenge by combining atmospheric science, artificial intelligence and multi-sensor observations.
The project brings together data from Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites, EarthCARE observations and ground-based camera networks to improve contrail detection and characterisation. By integrating contrail physics into deep-learning methods, the project aims to detect formations that conventional approaches may miss, including older, diffuse and cloud-embedded contrails.
Building on these observations, E-CONTRAIL 2 is developing methods to estimate contrail radiative forcing and an interactive dashboard to visualize contrails, their estimated climate impact and potential contrail outbreaks.
Download the poster
Through its participation in the workshop, E-CONTRAIL 2 highlighted how combining satellite and ground-based observations with physics-informed machine learning can help address important gaps in contrail research.
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