Does anyone have any RELIABLE information on this phenomenon?  My wife and I noticed ALOT of activity today over the skies where we live.   My wife was skeptical until we had the fortunate opportunity to compare what are known as "chemtrails" with "contrails" as there were two planes in the sky simultaneously this morning; one was clearly emitting a contrail which evaporated rather quickly behind the plane while we were able to compare it to another plane at the same time laying down a very long, permanent "chemtrail".  She was then able to see the vast difference between the two.  There were dozens of chemtrails this morning that eventually spread throughout the day to appear as light clouds in the sky.   What are they doing up there?

I certainly hope so, but do you recall seeing this in years past?  I don't recall ever noticing it until fairly recently.  The planes today appeared to be at nearly the same altitude, though it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty.  I once saw a plane laying down a "chemtrail" in literally a dotted-line fashion, as if he were controlled whatever was being dispensed.  

There were trails all over the sky today, I'm sure there are relatively equal amounts of air travel on any given day, just south of Indianapolis.  Why are some days clear whereas others are filled with these trails?

There were trails all over the sky today, I'm sure there are relatively equal amounts of air travel on any given day, just south of Indianapolis. Why are some days clear whereas others are filled with these trails?

Because atmospheric conditions are highly, highly variable across both time and space. For example, where I live in Denver, we had near record heat just yesterday; it was 78 degrees in October! But tonight we are under a winter storm advisory with 6-12 inches of snow expected. Frontal movements, the convective lifting of air parcels, topographical features, and literally dozens of other variables can and do cause sharp gradients of pressure, temperature, and humidity to form in the atmosphere.

Now in order for a persistent contrail to form behind a jet engine's exhaust, several conditions are usually necessary.

1) The plane must be flying above 26,000 feet.
2) The external temperature needs to be below -40 C.
3) The relative humidity of the air mass needs to be at or near the saturation point (i.e. the dew point, the point at which the air can contain no more water vapor at the given temperature).

If these conditions are all present, the genesis of a good contrail will ensue. It starts with jet's exhaust. The main combustion products of aviation fuel (which is basically just kerosene, but this analysis would be true for any hydrocarbon) are carbon dioxide and water. The water is in a gaseous state after having just left the extremely hot environment of the turbine's combustion chamber. But as it exits the engine housing, the exhaust gas rapidly expands and cools in the very cold air of the upper troposphere. This will cause the water vapor in the exhaust to condense out of the gaseous state and to form water droplets or, if the temperature is low enough, ice crystals. The process isn't automatic, however. These droplets/crystals need a surface to condense upon, or else they might remain suspended in the air in a supersaturated state. Fortunately these surfaces, called cloud condensation nuclei, are also provided by the jet's exhaust. They are present in the form of incompletely combusted carbon granules, basically microscopic particles of soot (like that black veneer that forms on your palm when you hold your hand over a candle flame). Each one of these tiny particles will find itself the accretion point for a miniscule droplet of liquid or frozen water.

This is where the relative humidity of the air comes in. If the air is relatively dry, then these water droplets will not last very long. They will evaporate into the air again, causing one of those rapidly disappearing contrails that seem to vanish a step behind the plane from whence they issue. But...if the air is moist and cannot contain any more water, then you've just made yoursellf a contrail my friend. The combustion of the jet fuel at high altitude literally dumped an excess of water into very cold, very wet air that could not hold any more moisture. It has no choice but to precipitate out as a cloud. Now think about this: The contrail you see high up in a clear sky is composed of water that was actually jet fuel one second ago. A moment earlier it was kerosene, and now you can actually drink it! How cool is that?

I know of several simple home experiments you can perform to replicate various stages of this process. For instance, if you would like to see water generated from hydrocarbons, try this. Hopefully you have a gas kitchen range. If so, then take your largest metallic stock pot and fill it with ice water. Then place the thing on the cook top and turn the heat up full blast. Within a moment or two, you should begin to see tiny droplets of vapor condensing up the sides of the vessel. This is water generated by the combustion of methane in oxygen: Virgin water, water that has never existed before. Collect a drop of it and place it on your tongue, and you've just ingested something that has not been in liquid form since the foundations of the world.

You can also replicate the condensation nuclei by creating a cloud in your bathroom. Light four or five sticks of incense in the bathroom with the door shut, and let them burn till it's nice and smokey in there. Now turn on the shower using only hot water (make sure you're not in the shower when you do this), and let the steam permeate the room. Then, with one deft maneuver, cut the hot water and switch the shower to all cold. If my calculations are correct, you should now have a contrail in your bathroom. Pretty neat, huh?

I once saw a plane laying down a "chemtrail" in literally a dotted-line fashion, as if he were controlled whatever was being dispensed.

This is an indication that the plane was flying through a region of turbulence where bubbles of moisture-laden air were breaking the equilibrium level. If you learn how to read these things, you can use a jet's contrail as an instrument wherewith to gauge the weather at high altitudes.

Several times we saw them in pentacle formation above Cincinnati.

Sometimes in a grid pattern.

No idea what they are, but for certain they would ruin nice, clear skies.  So, de-moralisation is one aspect.

Man of the West, thanks for the detailed response.  I would like to believe your account...

What stops you from doing so is your reason, Matthew.  Anyone who has ever seen a perfectly clear day become overcast/partly cloudy after they make their patterns in the sky knows darn well that it is NOT a natural phenomenon.  All talk to the contrary is nonsense, however kindly or innocently offered.

Does anyone have any RELIABLE information on this phenomenon?  My wife and I noticed ALOT of activity today over the skies where we live.   My wife was skeptical until we had the fortunate opportunity to compare what are known as "chemtrails" with "contrails" as there were two planes in the sky simultaneously this morning; one was clearly emitting a contrail which evaporated rather quickly behind the plane while we were able to compare it to another plane at the same time laying down a very long, permanent "chemtrail".  She was then able to see the vast difference between the two.  There were dozens of chemtrails this morning that eventually spread throughout the day to appear as light clouds in the sky.   What are they doing up there?

Same thing happened to me a few months ago. I think I posted about it on Facebook that day -- I tried to take a picture; don't remember how it turned out.

When you see 2 planes on the SAME DAY, SAME ATMOSPHERE, SAME HUMIDITY LEVEL, etc. and one of them is spraying a grid pattern, while the other leaves absolutely no trace in the sky -- that forces you to realize that something is up!

I would like to believe your account, but I simply don't recall this phenomenon until very recently.

People seldom recall things that have only a trifling significance for them. I don't recall the last three Buicks I saw on the road, either.  You probably just weren't paying attention before. But now that you've taken an interest in this subject, you'll start noticing contrails everywhere. There is a well-known type of cognative bias that occurs when an old and ever-present sensation suddenly acquires a new signification for us: we start to notice it selectively, perhaps even exaggerating its frequency. This alone may be contributing to your increased awareness of contrails. Please continue to watch the skies, even recording your observations if you want. In a short time you'll notice that nothing unusual is going on.

How do you explain these persistent contrails during the summer in the middle of a 90 degree day?

The air in the upper troposphere is much, much colder than the surface level air, even on a blistering hot summer day. This is why there are snows on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and a semi-tropical forest on the plains below it -- on the same day.




The decrease in atmospheric pressure with increasing altitude alone will cause a parcel of air to cool by 5.38 °F per 1,000 ft. This is called the adiabatic lapse rate. So, let's say that the surface temperature is 90 degrees in southern Indiana, elevation approximately 400 feet. That means that the air temperature at 26,000 feet, all other things being equal, will be...

(90 °F) - (5.38 °F X ((26,000 - 400) / 1000 ft.))

or...

-47.73 °F


...which is almost 140 degrees colder.

Of course it's not quite that simple. Assuming that the air is not perfectly dry to begin with (a fairly reasonable assumption), then at some point the rate of cooling will switch from the dry adiabatic lapse rate to the moist adiabatic lapse rate, which is slightly lower; however, we would not know when that point occured without knowing the original relative humidity of the air. Also, there is the fact that surface albedo forcing would have warmed the air directly above the ground to a greater extent than solar forcing alone would have done. But these secondary considerations aside, you get the drift. The air in the upper troposphere is much colder than the air at the surface even on a summer day, and plenty cold enough to cause contrails.

Anyone who has ever seen a perfectly clear day become overcast/partly cloudy after they make their patterns in the sky knows darn well that it is NOT a natural phenomenon.  All talk to the contrary is nonsense, however kindly or innocently offered.

Do you mean to suggest that commercial airlines -- who can scarcely make a profit to begin with, who are already taking every measure to cut weight and fuel consumption -- are not only loading up their planes with hundreds of additional pounds of chemtrail dust, but deliberately flying out of their way with their increased burden to make "patterns" in the sky, and that the longsuffering passangers with their GPS-equipped smartphones never notice the detour? And for what end, to make clouds? Now that is ridiculous.

As I've already stated repeatedly in this thread, the genesis of real, honest-to-God contrails is indeed a form of unintentional cloud seeding. There have also been attempts at intentional cloud seeding to generate rain, but research suggests that those attempts haven't amounted to much; and in any case, commercial airlines have nothing to do with the matter. But even supposing, per impossibile, that the airlines were up there wasting time making clouds, absolutely nothing bad has resulted from any of this. The world is still turning, is it not? You've got a dubious murder weapon and no body. Case closed.

 

FWIW, if the chemtrail debunkers' explanations were legitimate/reasonable, you'd actually see MANY MORE "long-lasting contrails" above major metropolitan areas than you do on those days when the conditions are as their theory suggests. If, say, 100 planes fly over a certain area at over 26000 ft (which happens every single day in many areas) when certain conditions are in effect, why are there not just as many long-lasting contrails as there are planes in the sky above 26K ft? Uh, because that explanation is absolute hogwash.

Epic fail, Eamon. Utterly pathetic. The vast majority of the planes that you'll see flying over metropolitan areas will (obviously) be those flying into or out of the airport(s); hence flying at low altitudes, were contrails do not naturally form anyway. Once an airliner reaches its cruising altitude there is no particular reason for it to fly over a city; and since it will take the most economical flightpath toward its destination, and since most of the country is uninhabited, high altitude jets are not seen with any exaggerated frequency over urban areas, and there would be no reason to expect an especially large number of contrails to appear there. But if your theory were correct, then you might see an escalating number of chemtrails at low altitudes, since flying low over an urban corridor would be the optimum way to disperse whatever nefarious agent you allege they're afflicting upon us, hitting the densest population centers at the least cost. That assumes, of course, that these maniacally brilliant manipulators of the world puppet-theater are not too stupid to camoflage what they're doing, so that even you can figure it out. In any case, trails at low altitudes would not (ordinarily -- there are exceptions) be contrails, although there is no reason to assume that they are malign. They might result from a smoking engine, a fuel dump, or a wingtip vortex. There is no reason to assume that trails at high altitudes are anything but contrails.

When you see 2 planes on the SAME DAY, SAME ATMOSPHERE, SAME HUMIDITY LEVEL, etc. and one of them is spraying a grid pattern, while the other leaves absolutely no trace in the sky -- that forces you to realize that something is up!

No two planes are ever flying through the same atmosphere or the same atmospheric conditions. The atmosphere is an unstable fluid with sharply divergent boundary conditions; i.e., atmospheric variables differ rapidly across space and time. That is why we have such things as clouds and weather in the first place. Without such divergences, the atmosphere would be nothing but a cold, uniform haze. Have you never seen a squall line before?



Any two planes that you see in the sky are likely separated by thousands of feet both vertically and horizontally; flight plans and air traffic controllers see to that. This means that they are NOT flying through the same atmospheric conditions at all. For you to suggest that they are literally "in the same atmosphere" is tantamount to you looking at the picture above and exclaiming, "Hey, I see clouds and rain in one region of the sky and clear skies in another. Something is up!"

Yeah, something is up alright. It's called scientific illiteracy. Fortunately, you don't have to let this happen to you. There is an abundance of good meteorological information available on the web. Try having a look. You can start here.

MOTW- very impressive! Where did you get all this stuff? Did you study Meteorology in school? And thanks for sharing!

In a manner of speaking, yes. I studied engineering physics and "Earth Systems Sciences" (which is basically geology with an interdisciplinary outreach toward meteorology, biology, and chemistry) at the Colorado School of Mines. I've also studied philosophy up to the graduate level at CU. Not that I place much emphasis on this, but perhaps it is helpful, from time to time, to mention that I am not entirely without authority in such matters.

And you're welcome.  :cool: