Visual Analysis and Detection of Contrails in Aircraft Engine Simulations

Fig. 1. Visual analysis of contrails using multiple coordinated views. (A) Filters for I/O/model parameters and color legend. (B) Colored-tile glyphs representing groups of same-parameter ensemble members; the bottom run is currently selected. A large number of runs appear to share the same input parameters. (C) Filament plots grouping output parameters of all ensemble runs; the current run is highlighted and appears significantly different. (D) 3D plumes of two similar runs, showing cooling temperatures further down the jet plume, along with animated particle trajectories. (E) Contrail evolution panel displaying the progression of contrail structures, showing a general trend where smaller groups merge into larger groups.

Abstract-Contrails are condensation trails generated from emitted particles by aircraft engines, which perturb Earth's radiation budget. Simulation modeling is used to interpret the formation and development of contrails. These simulations are computationally intensive and rely on high-performance computing solutions, and the contrail structures are not well defined. We propose a visual computing system to assist in defining contrails and their characteristics, as well as in the analysis of parameters for computer-generated aircraft engine simulations. The back-end of our system leverages a contrail-formation criterion and clustering methods to detect contrails' shape and evolution and identify similar simulation runs. The front-end system helps analyze contrails and their parameters across multiple simulation runs. The evaluation with domain experts shows this approach successfully aids in contrail data investigation.