Closing the Loop on Contrail Avoidance with Satellite Verification
Contrails are the thin ice clouds that aircraft leave behind. They cause a large share of aviation's warming, and rerouting the few flights that produce them could avoid much of it. However, an avoided contrail only counts if a satellite can confirm that it never formed, and this check is hard: contrails are one to two pixels wide, cover only 0.18% of pixels, and look very similar to natural cirrus. We build a small diffusion model (8.4M parameters, trained on one GPU) that detects them, and we run a controlled study to find out which components matter. The model reaches 0.476 PR-AUC, compared with 0.414 for a DeepLabV3+ baseline and 0.119 for an adapted MedSegDiff. Doubling the input res...
| Authors | Spandan Ghose Chowdhury |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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