Midwest - Contrails over Muscatine, IA

I was traveling on business this week in Muscatine, IA of all places. It was beautiful weather all week. I couldn't help notice that in the sky were many, many jet contrails as far as the eye could see and covering almost the entire sky. It's like they made their own weather and if wasn't for those contrails, it would have been a cloudless day. My question is in this part of the US is this a major east-west (or vice versa) "highway" in the sky for air traffic?

I can't answer your questions, but will offer two interesting points about contrails:

Google chemtrails (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=EKC&q=chemtrails&btnG=Search). Some believe it's a massive government conspiracy.

There's also some interesting research (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html) that these contrails affect the weather. This is based on information collected during the few no-fly days after 9/11.

Go to flightaware.com to see what's flying in your neighborhood today

Also, there is a series of maps ("Jetrivia") which superimpose the US Jet Routes over the highways and cities/towns. Muscatine is just south and about 25 miles east of Iowa City over which 4 long-range jet routes converge (J10, 60, 146, 192). Traffic on these routes typically goes from parts of the West Coast or Denver to Cleveland, Washington, Philadelphia, etc. Indeed many transcon jet routes as well as the routes from the West Coast/Rockies to/from O'Hare/Midway are over Iowa.

[With mod hat on:] Let's continue discussion in our Travel->Midwest forum. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator, TravelBuzz

An interesting read on what happened to contrails after 9/11 grounded all commercial flights. (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html)