TrackMatcher is a Julia package for finding intersections between different trajectories. It is aimed at finding intersections of the flight paths of aircrafts and of satellite tracks, but is highly adjustable to any other user input. TrackMatcher was developed to enable the investigations of contrail effects by aviation on the Earth’s radiation budget and climate with spaceborne lidar measurements.
We will give an overview of the package’s capabilities and show first applications investigating contrail effects in aviation with spaceborne lidar measurements. We will explain the algorithm, which uses MATLAB’s Piecewise Cubic Hermite Interpolating Polynomial (PCHIP) function to interpolate track data and finds intersections between trajectories, where the distance of coordinate pairs of the aircraft and satellite trajectory, respectively, approach zero.
Temporal and spatial data of the intersections as well as relevant satellite and aircraft data are stored in structs for further analysis. The algorithm is highly adjustable so that it can be adapted for other applications such as investigation of ship tracks or cloud tracking.
Parameters exist to compromise between accuracy of results and computation time or allow to exclude certain data, e.g. below an altitude threshold of the aircraft, outside a time difference of the delay between the aircraft and the satellite overpass at the intersection or based on the presence or absence of clouds.
Sensitivity studies of the parameters and limitations of the current version will be discussed in detail.