News - South African Astronomical Observatory
Civil Air Patrol Volunteers Use GLOBE Clouds to Monitor Contrails
The Civil Air Patrol (CAP)–a nonprofit organization that serves as the civilian auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force to support search and rescue, disaster relief efforts, and aerospace education–has started a new mission in collaboration with NASA. The 2026 Aviation Skywatch Mission will take place in 47 states and two territories in the United States, as well as Belgium, Germany, Guam, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Over 3,500 volunteers are expected to participate in this mission, taking measurements on 14 March, 11 April, and 16 May.
Participants will use the GLOBE Clouds tool to report full cloud observations every 15 minutes, sending photographs and contrail reports at smaller intervals using the feature photo option. CAP members are also collecting aircraft information from participating commercial airplane trackers that can be used to monitor fuel type, age of the engine, and altitude of the planes causing the contrails. Dr. Dave Duda from the NASA Langley SatCORPS team is contributing contrail potential forecast maps over the continental US for CAP members to use and compare with their observations. The data will help NASA scientists better understand weather conditions that impact commercial aircraft while giving CAP members hands-on STEM experiences that make a difference.
The 2026 Aviation Skywatch Mission builds on the success of the 2025 Aviation Weather Mission, which collected over 10,000 observations and tracked 1,300 commercial airplanes from April to July 2025 thanks to the participation of 3,800 CAP members. This unique dataset of contrail and airplane information is now available for download. The 2025 Aviation Weather Mission was developed to further study the changes in contrail and high clouds, building off research that used GLOBE Eclipse data collected during the 2024 total solar eclipse in North America.
News origin: GLOBE Implementation Office