Posted on 06/08/2021 11:58:37 AM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
The 17-year “Brood X” cicadas are hatching in such high numbers that they’re being picked up by weather radar in Virginia.
“THIS is not rain, not ground clutter,” NBC meteorologist Lauryn Ricketts tweeted on Monday. “So likely CICADAS being picked up by the radar beam.”
Pallozzi said the NWS has a weather radar located in Sterling, Virginia, in the same region as the radar map that Ricketts posted, and explained that the beams the radar devices send out rise the further they travel from the machine.
So the beams are picking up the newly emerged cicadas on the ground near the Sterling radar, but fewer and fewer cicadas are identified as the beam’s height increases away from the ground, which is why the blip on the map is so close to the radar itself, Pallozzi said.
The NWS’ Baltimore-Washington account tweeted on Saturday that local radar was reporting “a lot of fuzziness” that it attributed to cicadas.
While the cicadas are populous enough for weather radar to notice them, Pallozzi said it’s easy for any meteorologist to discern the difference between weather events and cicadas due to the “Hydrometeor Classification Algorithm.”
Pallozzi said the NWS can use the algorithm to determine the likelihood that a radar beam is picking up hail, rain, snow, something biological, or more.
And cicadas can be really noisy too:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1401920157413482500
After 17 years underground, billions of red-eyed cicadas are beginning to crawl their way to the surface in portions of the United States. The periodical insects, known as Brood X or Brood 10, have begun emerging from the earth in 15 eastern states and Washington, D.C., from Georgia to New York and west to Indiana and Illinois.
“There will be birth. There will be death. There will be romance in the treetops. There will be wicked sex. There will be predators. It’s going to be better than an episode of Game of Thrones…”
I haven’t heard a single one up here in York, PA. Yet.
I've been looking forward to them since the last brood X.
Ours are running late due to cold temps.
And this is funny, if you're into bug anatomy...
Looks like York is not in the brood X area. Just on the edge of X.
someone could make a lot of money sucking them up and freezing them to sell as chicken feed.
Same here in the Slate Belt of PA.
Cicadas are related to shrimp and crawfish. When I was a kid in Virginia, my Dad gave my sister and I, buckets of ice and showed us how to take the cicadas just after they loose their shell and before their new skin hardens. We plucked them off the trees and put them on ice. Later my mom would steam them just like shrimp or crabs and we’d eat them. Believe it or not, they actually taste like shrimp.
They’re thick in some parts of Northern Kentucky. As a tinnitus sufferer, I’ve told my wife, welcome to my world.
In Baltimore they’re so loud it can hurt your ear sitting in a car with the window down while waiting for a light to change.
Apparently squirrels have a taste for shrimp, then.
It’s bad enough trying to avoid hitting the cicadas flying low across the roads, here, but you have to watch for the squirrels who keep darting out to snatch up the carstruck ones.
They sound just like the Invaders from Mars War machines from the Gene Barry 1950ies version of the invasion.
Exactly.
Didn’t somebody use them as sound effects for some alien invasion movie, maybe War Of The Worlds?
Danged things are CREATING their own weather, there’s that many of them.
Yesterday, my car was covered with tiny microdroplets of cicada fluids of some kind. I don’t want to think to long about that. Today, I had to pull a cicada out of my cat’s long hair. They are oily, stupid, loud, and everywhere.
How odd.
I have a friend in your general area who says he’s slowly being driven mad by the Cicadic cacophony.
Isn’t it wonderful?
;)
LOCUSTS!!
They are also said to be good stir-fried in oil in a cast iron skillet with some chopped garlic and Old Bay seasoning.
Let's make lemonade out of lemons here.
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