A Full Day of Spotless Blue Skies & Today's Aviaticus (Contrail) Forecast

Lots of air traffic today on our Fly Way but not a whiff or needle of contrail (aviaticus clouds) to be seen. I was up at Legend Lake in Menominee County for an hour and did see one commercial jet pass over overhead, a rare occurrence.  The sun was so bright that without the dead quite of this northern woods I may not even have seen or have heard it pass over.

Earlier just south of Legend Lake in Shawano, the radar showed the normal fly way traffic mostly from Minneapolis to eastern destinations and the many Eastern flights that pass by us heading west, the usual flights from Asia that crossed over or through Alaska before tracking southward to Chicago.  Yet not a whiff of aviaticus to be seen all day. Despite all this aircraft activity even the the small town noise of Shawano over-tones the purr of high altitude aircraft, making them difficult to to spot.

A shot of today's sky, all day Friday:)!

Tomorrow's Aviaticus Cloud Forecast

Trails developing only with a little luck late Saturday afternoon as snow is predicted that evening and if east/west air traffic will still be busy. The front should move in from the west and may be preceded by high altitude moist air. Aviation Trails should appear in my location looking south to Clintonville just before sunset.  Some could be light and unlikely to spread into cirrostratus aviaticus before dark.

We should have a clearing Monday and Tuesday and may then have the best day for Aviation trails, just before natural cirrus clouds appear.

UPDATE:  By 3:00 PM Saturday, a west bound flight. a McDonald Douglas MD 90 NY to Minneapolis passed overhead and then started to spit out intermittent dashings of needle thin aviaticus clouds which shortly thereafter turned into steady short contrail. After that all westbound flights started contrailing as they reached that line but only those between 32-34000'.  The higher altitude flights did not form any aviaticus clouds and were much more difficult to visually locate in the cloudless brilliant blue sky.