Dehydration effects from contrails in a coupled contrail–climate model

Kurzfassung

The uptake of water by contrails in ice-supersaturated air and release of water after ice particle advection and sedimentation dehydrates the atmosphere at flight levels and redistributes humidity mainly to lower levels. The dehydration is investigated by coupling a plume-scale contrail model with a global aerosol-climate model. The contrail model simulates all the individual contrails forming from global air traffic for meteorological conditions as defined by the climate model. The computed contrail-cirrus properties compare reasonably with theoretical concepts and observations. The mass of water in aged contrails may exceed 106 times the mass of water emitted from aircraft. Many of the ice particles sediment and release water in the troposphere, on average 700 m below the mean flight levels. Simulations with and without coupling are compared. The drying at contrail levels causes thinner and longer lived contrails with about 15 % reduced contrail radiative forcing (RF). The reduced RF from contrails is of the order 0.06 W m-2, slightly larger than estimated earlier because of higher soot emissions. For normal traffic, the RF from dehydration is small compared to interannual variability. A case with 100 times increased emissions is used to overcome statistical uncertainty. The contrails impact the entire hydrological cycle in the atmosphere by reducing the total water column and the cover of high and low-level clouds. For normal traffic, the dehydration changes contrail RF by positive shortwave and negative longwave contributions of order 0.04 W m-2, with a small negative net RF. The total net RF from contrails and dehydration remains within the range of previous estimates.