Ship trail/cloud dynamic effects from Apollo-Soyuz photograph July 16, 1975
We describe in this paper the results of a preliminary analysis of a ship trail photograph taken by the Apollo-Soyuz crew at 22:21 GMT on 16 July 1975. The photograph was taken from an altitude of 174 km and shows three separate ship trails with two of the trails intersecting. Because these photographs were taken from a non-geosynchronous satellite with a high-resolution camera, the quality of the photograph provides more detail than is usually obtained from meteorological satellites (minimum spatial resolution 14 m compared to 57 m from Landsat). The photograph not only shows enhanced detail of the ship trails themselves, but also cloud free bands generated by the ship trails. The ship trails have maximum photographed widths of 3--6 km. These cloud free bands are an obvious indication of the importance of ship trail cloud dynamics to ship trial development. These cloud dynamical effects are driven both by the initial energy release of the ship's power plant and by latent heat release from the aerosol nucleation process. Since the aerosol nucleation process is the key to understanding ocean aerosol/cloud interactions, it is important to partition these two processes in the ship trial development. We will describe in this paper preliminary numerical modeling efforts to simulate the ship trails using only the energy release from the ship and thereby give an indication of how much more energy input may be required from the nucleation process. 12 refs., 6 figs.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 6609707
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-88-3341; CONF-890134-1; ON: DE89002042
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Symposium on the role of clouds in atmospheric chemistry and global climate, Anaheim, CA, USA, 29 Jan 1989; Other Information: Paper copy only, copy does not permit microfiche production
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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