Aircraft “hole punch” and “dissipation trails” over the eastern Great Lakes
GOES-13 (GOES-East ) Visible (0.63 µm) images centered over Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and central New York state (below) showed a variety of aircraft “hole punch” and “dissipation trails” over the eastern Great Lakes on 03 March 2016.
These cloud features were caused by aircraft that were either ascending or descending through layers of cloud composed of supercooled water droplets, which covered much of the region as shown by the POES AVHRR Cloud Type product at 1545 UTC (below). Cooling from wake turbulence (reference) and/or the particles from the jet engine exhaust acting as ice condensation nuclei cause the small water droplets to turn into larger ice crystals (which then often fall from the cloud layer, creating “fall streak holes“). Similar features have been discussed in previous blog posts. There were numerous pilot reports of light to moderate icing between FL120 and FL160 (flight level 12,000-16,000 feet) when passing through the supercooled water droplet cloud layers (below). The pilot report altitudes agree well with the POES AVHRR Cloud Top Height product values of 4-5 km over Lake Erie at 1545 UTC. A comparison of 250-meter resolution Terra MODIS true-color and false-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) images at 1649 UTC as visualized using RealEarth (below) indicated that the cloud material in the center of the aircraft dissipation trail over the north shore of Lake Erie had glaciated (snow, ice, and ice crystal clouds exhibit a darker cyan appearance on the false-color image). A panorama photo from the ground was taken in Binghamton, New York (station identifier KBGM, located near the center of the New York GOES-13 images):#Holepunch cloud (panorama) over Broome & Chenango County from ground & ~22,000 miles above. pic.twitter.com/s0TsCMeBxR
— HowardManges (@HowardManges) March 3, 2016