The July 2024 issue of IEEE Computing Edge magazine’ section on Data Visualization features the contrail visual computing digital twin work conducted by EVL graduate students Nafiul Nipu, and Carla Floricel, along with their advisor professor G. Elisabeta Marai. This research was done in collaboration with professor Roberto Paoli (MIE).

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.