Written by Ross Marsden, Meteorologist

On the afternoon of Monday 19 July 2010, a neat set of four persistent contrails moved across the Cook Strait area.  NASA's  MODIS Rapid Response System captured the contrails in the image stream from the Aqua space craft which was over Wellington at about 2:20 pm. You can see the image on the MODIS web site here:  http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=NewZealand.2010200.aqua.1km  Here’s part of the MODIS image.