Contrail rings detected with the research aircraft Falcon
Christiane Voigt
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt(DLR), Germany
At 10 km altitude above Germany.
Categories
Location
Tag
Reuse
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) (opens in a new window)Credit: Christiane Voigt (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
Properties
Type
Image
Format
JPG
Size
613.2 KB
Aspect
4:3
Width
1500 px
Height
1125 px
Exposure
12 mm f/8 1/1250 s ISO 50
Tint
Moderate blue
Submitted
20 October 2010
Comments
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.