
Contrail rings detected with the research aircraft Falcon
by Christiane Voigt, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt(DLR), Germany
At 10 km altitude above Germany.
Submitted on 20 October 2010
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Credit: Christiane Voigt (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
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Konstantinos Kourtidis 12 years ago
The ring is a result of the so-called Crow Instability. In aerodynamics, the Crow Instability is a line-vortex instability, named after S. C. Crow. It is most commonly observed in the skies behind large aircraft, when the wingtip vortices interact with contrails from the engines, producing visible distortions in the shape of the contrail. The instability goes through several stages, at one fo which waves reconnect, forming the contrail rings as the one photographed here.