It’s fairly common knowledge that meteorologists use Doppler radar to track the movement of various forms of precipitation.
But the NEXRAD Doppler records everything that is in the air space, and U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist Rick Sojda hopes to use the radar to track the migratory patterns of birds. He’s working with a Montana State University graduate student to develop an algorithm that could detect and track birds.
While the work is still in its early stages, it’s “showing great promise,” said Sojda, who is based at the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Mont.
“The thing that’s driving most of it in the near term is the siting of wind turbines,” he said.
Officials don’t want to install wind turbines along migration paths because that could lead to numerous birds being killed and wind turbines being damaged.
“We have some idea of where those key areas would be, but at the same token we don’t have any quantitative data over the last 10 to 15 years,” he said.
When turbine locations are chosen, “we want to have some data behind it,” he said.
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This “technology” already exists and the USGS is “reinventing the wheel” … the US Air Force has a system – the Avian Hazard Advisory System (www.usAHAS.com) – that has been using NEXRAD to track bird movements/ activity and provide risk advisories to US military flying units for bird-aricraft strike risk management since 1998. The system first covers the continental US providing 6 minutes bird activity data updates 24-7. Over 8 years of data is archived that already being used to assess a variety of sites with avian issues such as wind farms, landfills and new airports.
That is a great observation (by gwandrews) and a system with which my colleagues and I have some familiarity. Sound science requires our work to undergo scientific peer review. Because the military and related contractors have been unable to publish their computer algorithms in the scientific literature, we are unable to use them for sifting through the NEXRAD archive. Should we base our work on unpublished methods, we are not confident that we could fully publish our resultant findings in a manner that will pass scientific muster. There are some other differences in our work from theirs, but this is not the crux of the point made by the previous blog poster. In another vein, we hope that our collaborations beginning with the National Weather Service will help inform our research in the realm of building our methods on published science.
The USGS has a web site describing some of our work: http://www.fort.usgs.gov/radar/ . And, you can read extended abstracts from our most recent workshop: http://www.fort.usgs.gov/radar/