Marlene V. Euchenhofer

Marlene Euchenhofer is a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics pushing forward on multi-sensor approaches to identify and track aircraft contrails in real time. Contrails are responsible for roughly half of aviation’s climate impact. While operational adjustments to an aircraft’s trajectory can reduce persistent contrail formation and a flight’s overall warming impact, contrail predictions need to be verified, and current observation methods are severely limited: geostationary satellites miss up to 80% of contrails visible in higher-resolution imagery. She uses MATLAB for geospatial data processing of satellite observations, combining remote sensing data from different sensors with meteorological datasets to characterize observable contrail populations. As a MathWorks Fellow, Marlene will advance these multi-platform observation frameworks and integrate additional data sources to improve contrail observation and verification capabilities. Her work could enable climate-conscious aviation by informing verifiable real-time flight adjustments while maintaining global connectivity.