George,
The online paper you found in the journal Weather has contact details for the authors. I Googled Schultz, and I found that he’s still at Manchester University:
https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/david.schultz.html.
I think it would be worth contacting him, sharing your photo with him, and asking for his view on how your upward features were formed – his paper deals with below and sideways formation, but not upwards.
Let us know what the outcome is – we are all interested.
Note that the picture with ‘upward’ lobes that you mention (his Fig. 6, I think) is of Kelvin-Helmholtz, which are not the same at all, but are still very interesting. I love K-H formations, which are relatively rare.
I have a question about ‘your’ contrail – what was its behaviour to the left and right of the area of your photo?
Plus, I think we all need to keep our eyes open and start to make notes of any contrails we see that develop this feature, whether up or down. This will provide a good statistical data-set so that we can understand how rare are the upward formations, and if the direction can change along a contrail. A fun bit of “Citizen Science”.
Regards,
Doctor_NO.
