The ice supersaturation biases limiting contrail modelling are structured around extratropical depressions

Abstract. Contrails are ice clouds formed along aircraft flight tracks, responsible for much of aviation's climate warming impact. Ice-supersaturated regions (ISSRs) provide conditions where contrail ice crystals can persist, but meteorological models often mispredict their occurrence, limiting contrail modelling. This deficiency is often treated by applying local humidity corrections. However, model performance is also affected by synoptic conditions (such as extratropical depressions). Here, composites of ERA5 reanalysis data around North Atlantic extratropical depressions enable a link between their structure and ISSR modelling. ISSRs are structured by these systems: at flight levels, ISSRs occur less frequently in the dry intrusion – descending upper-tropospheric air – than above warm conveyors – where air is lifted. Both ERA5 reanalysis and in situ aircraft observations show this contrast, demonstrating that the model reproduces the fundamental relationship. Individual-ISSR modelling performance (quantified using interpretable metrics) is also structured. Of the rare ISSRs diagnosed in the location associated with the dry intrusion, fewer are confirmed by in situ observations (20 %–25 % precision drop compared to the warm conveyor) and fewer of those observed were diagnosed (13 %–19 % recall drop). Scaling humidity beyond the occurrence rate bias dramatically increases the recall at low precision cost, demonstrating the potential value of scaling approaches designed with different intentions. However, the failure of scaling to improve precision, or the performance in the dry intrusion, implies that there is a need to account for the synoptic weather situation and structure in order to improve ISSR forecasts in support of mitigating aviation's climate impact.