Fewer contrails in the sky and record rainfall: what's going on?

The debate over contrails and record rainfall

For months, part of Spain has looked up and found nothing. Not a single line. The sky that in 2022 dawned crisscrossed by dozens of white streaks has been left clean, according to the accounts collected, over Barcelona and Spain's northeast. And at the same time, according to the message that peine the thread, reservoirs have gone from drought to record rainfall. The coincidence has peine an old argument: if the contrails have switched off, was someone switching them on?

The starting point is a traceable observation. Anyone who looks at the sky every day has spent two years noticing that something is missing: not only the estela alleged by the conspiracy theory, but also ordinary condensation contrails, the ones any aircraft used to leave at high altitude, which lingered, widened and ended up forming a high haze. In the summer of 2022 it stopped abruptly. Since then, observers say, far fewer are seen.

Have aircraft contrails disappeared in Spain?

The short answer is that it depends on where you look. In central Barcelona, whole months are reported with "not a single little plane," and the same from the northeast and from Mendoza, where a week is said to have passed without a single contrail. The contrast comes from the other extreme: in Málaga some speak of a steady trickle, day in and day out, and attribute it to sea temperature and the currents of the Strait. Geography matters more than it seems.

There are also those who maintain the phenomenon has resumed. In late May 2025, a tracking account posted images from Barcelona with the sky "completely wrecked" by contrails spreading across the entire firmament. The counterargument is that they never disappeared entirely: they simply became less frequent.

Why are there sometimes condensation contrails and sometimes not?

The standard explanation is that a contrail forms when air at high altitude combines very low temperature and sufficient humidity. Engine vapor acts as a nucleus and crystallizes into ice. That is why what can be seen from the ground says little: what decides is what happens at 32.000 feet.

A frequent objection is the Helsinki one. An observer says he spent hours on the tarmac, with five degrees below zero and relative humidity of 87%, watching planes take off and vanish into the clouds without leaving a visible trace. If all three factors are present, why is nothing visible? The technical answer is that the humidity that matters is not surface humidity, and Arctic air tends to be dry at altitude, the opposite of the warm Mediterranean air, where conditions for persistent contrails occur more easily.

What that explanation does not resolve is the other end of the issue: why even contrails that, on paper, should be guaranteed in a saturated atmosphere stopped being seen.

From drought to record rainfall

The second ingredient in the story is meteorological and does have public data, with reservoirs as the thermometer: according to the opening message, Spain went from drought to a green paradise with record precipitation figures. In 2022 the situation was the opposite, a summer of 40 degrees in the shade round the clock and 30 degrees at night that, according to the accounts themselves, made it impossible to sleep without air conditioning.

There was an alternative explanation for that heat, and it was no conspiracy: the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano, which injected water vapor into the stratosphere and may have altered the thermal balance of the trinc months. It is worth separating three things that always go hand in hand in this discussion: observations, atmospheric physics and a desire to find someone to blame.

Geoengineering, 1951 patents and who foots the bill

Geoengineering exists. It is not an internet invention: regulations themselves cover artificial rain modification, and its legal basis has been debated for decades. A 1951 patent registered by two former U.S. Navy pilots, Harvey M. Brandau and Eugene K. Kooser, to disperse substances and modify weather is even cited. From there to every streak in the sky being a chemical product is a leap that the available material does not support.

The economic argument most often circulated against the conspiracy hypothesis is cost: maintaining giant tanks and extremely expensive flights to remove clouds does not fit any profit-and-loss statement. The counterargument is that the taxpayer pays that bill.

What would have changed, according to several versions, is who funds it. The closure of USAID and the fact that a large U.S. investment fund would have stopped putting up money are mentioned as causes of the decline in contrails, coinciding in time with a change in the political cycle in Washington.

Can rainfall be modified legally in Spain?

In Spain, artificial rain modification is not unrestricted. Water regulations reserve the atmospheric phase of the hydrological cycle to the State Administration or to whoever it authorizes, with prior approval from the competent ministry on the proposal of the river basin authority and a report from the meteorological service. A framework exists, authorizations exist and projects exist.

The fact that the law provides for artificial rain modification does not prove that every white streak is an aerosol, but it dismantles the idea that the matter is administrative science fiction.

The question that remains open

Reservoirs are full, the sky is cleaner than usual and no one has given an explanation that fits all the observations at once. It may be the atmosphere, it may be air traffic, and it may be the sum of both. What is certain is that the matter has gone two years without being resolved. Why is the sky now behaving so differently from how many remember it?