Week 4

This week I continued to gather data for the contrail catcher project. I had a few questions that arose while recording data, most notably how to find relative humidity and temperature data at a specific altitude. Amy had recommended that I check the aviation weather center website to find this data, however, I had some difficulties finding this data as the website is somewhat unintuitive. I asked her again in this week’s meeting and she showed me how to find it and read it as well. The data is presented in a 6 digit number such as 275954. The first 3 digits represent the direction of the wind in degrees, the 4th number represents the wind speed in knots and the last 2 numbers represent temperature (of course at 34000ft the air temperature is negative). After figuring out to read this data I found a potential problem with the data available, the nearest airport where this data is available in Richmond. I asked Amy about this and she said that it was fine so I continued to use this data. While taking pictures I also observed that it is really helpful to have a high-resolution telephoto camera as taking pictures of an aircraft at 34000 ft with a wide angle lens does not produce great results. Because of this, I switched to using my old Samsung Galaxy Note 9 for taking photographs as it has a 2x telephoto lens as my iPhone 13 does not.


Another problem that I faced was that I could not find data for finding relative humidity. I tried to circumnavigate it by calculating relative humidity in excel using the August-Roche-Magnus approximation. This equation relied on temperature and dew point to find the value of relative humidity. Amy actually had this same issue a month or two ago and sent me an equation that Dr. Sherry sent her alongside a paper explaining it. This equation relied on altitude which was a data point that I had access to. In the coming weeks, I expect to continue gathering data for this project. See you next week!