Visual Analysis and Detection of Contrails in Aircraft Engine Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual computing system that aids in defining, analyzing, and detecting contrails in aircraft engine simulations, addressing the challenges of computational intensity and poorly defined structures.

Contribution

It presents a novel visual analysis system combining contrail-formation criteria and clustering to improve contrail detection and analysis in simulation data.

Findings

System effectively detects contrail shapes and evolution.

Assists in identifying similar simulation runs.

Evaluated successfully with domain experts.

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.