Abstract.A novel approach for the detection of cirrus clouds and the retrieval of optical thickness and top altitude based on the measurements of the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) aboard the geostationary Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite is presented. Trained with 8000000 co-incident measurements of the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) mission the new "cirrus optical properties derived from CALIOP and SEVIRI algorithm during day and night" (COCS) algorithm utilizes a backpropagation neural network to provide accurate measurements of cirrus optical depth τ at λ = 532 nm and top altitude z every 15 min covering almost one-third of the Earth's atmosphere. The retrieved values are validated with independent measurements of CALIOP and the optical thickness derived by an airborne high spectral resolution lidar.

Abstract. The automatic contrail tracking algorithm (ACTA) -developed to automatically follow contrails as they age, drift and spread -enables the study of a large number of contrails and the evolution of contrail properties with time. In this paper we present a year's worth of tracked contrails,

Abstract. Photogrammetric methods and analysis results for contrails observed with wide-angle cameras are described. Four cameras of two different types (view angle < 90 • or whole-sky imager) at the ground at various positions are used to track contrails and to derive their altitude, width, and horizontal speed. Camera models for both types are described to derive the observation angles for given image coordinates and their inverse. The models are calibrated with sightings of the Sun, the Moon and a few bright stars. The methods are applied and tested in a case study. Four persistent contrails crossing each other, together with a short-lived one, are observed with the cameras. Vertical and horizontal positions of the contrails are determined from the camera images to an accuracy of better than 230 m and horizontal speed to 0.2 m s −1 . With this information, the aircraft causing the contrails are identified by comparison to traffic waypoint data. The observations are compared with synthetic camera pictures of contrails simulated with the contrail prediction model CoCiP, a Lagrangian model using air traffic movement data and numerical weather prediction (NWP) data as input. The results provide tests for the NWP and contrail models. The cameras show spreading and thickening contrails, suggesting ice-supersaturation in the ambient air. The ice-supersaturated layer is found thicker and more humid in this case than predicted by the NWP model used. The simulated and observed contrail positions agree up to differences caused by uncertain wind data. The contrail widths, which depend on wake vortex spreading, ambient shear and turbulence, were partly wider than simulated.

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