Contrail Detection on GOES-16 ABI With the OpenContrails Dataset

Abstract

Contrails (condensation trails) are line-shaped ice clouds caused by aircraft and are a substantial contributor to aviation-induced climate change. Contrail avoidance is potentially an inexpensive way to significantly reduce the climate impact of aviation. An automated contrail detection system is an essential tool to develop and evaluate contrail avoidance systems. In this article, we present a human-labeled dataset named OpenContrails to train and evaluate contrail detection models based on GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) data. We propose and evaluate a contrail detection model that incorporates temporal context for improved detection accuracy. The human labeled dataset and the contrail detection outputs are publicly available on Google Cloud Storage at <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">gs://goes_contrails_dataset</monospace> .