Posted on 09/04/2006 6:59:40 PM PDT by Marius3188
GREEN BAY, Wis. - A case of fowl weather really threw a local meteorologist for a loop.
National Weather Service Meteorologist Tom Helman said at about sunrise Aug. 10 he saw a growing ring on the weather radar over the bay of Green Bay.
"It kinda threw me for a loop. That was the morning President Bush was flying in, so I was thinking, what is that?" said Helman, who works in Ashwaubenon.
Jeff Last, a warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service, said Monday he researched the ring and determined it was likely a "roost ring" - a formation of birds dispersing to look for food.
Last said the birds were likely double-crested cormorants or sea gulls, which use Chambers Island at night as they migrate.
The weather service posted the image on the Internet. But how many birds and what exactly kind is unknown.
"It's a very interesting pattern. It is almost certainly caused by birds, but I'm not sure what kind," said Robert Howe, professor of biology and environmental sciences at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060904/GPG0101/609040460
You can bet the tinfoil hatters will be all over it.
Thanks!
The Radar Ornithology Laboratory at Clemson University (CUROL) was established in 1990. The laboratory is devoted to the acquisition and analysis of radar data as it relates to bird movements in the atmosphere. Relating radar data, field observation, satellite imagery, and weather data, our laboratory has discovered important factors controlling temporal and spatial patterns of daily and seasonal movements of birds. Our use of the WSR-88D (NEXRAD - Weather Surveillance Radar 88D) network in the United States has allowed us to record large-scale migration events and relate these to topography and local and regional weather conditions. We also are using these data to develop continent-wide and regional migration maps and to build predictive models of migration for different regions of the United States.Having observed those rings before in the morning, we deduced those this to be phenom involving localized 'ducting' changes as the air is warm by a rising sun. The rings we observed were concentric with any of the oberved RADAR sites where we have seen this phenom.
The article states: "It looked like a doughnut, growing larger and larger over the bay of Green Bay. " so it could have been 'birds', but I kinda wonder given what several of us have observed elsewhere ...
We get that quite often in the morning at both EVX and TLH 88-D's here in the Florida Panhandle.
Hard to picture a flock of birds fanning out from a central point and in a near-perfect circle.
Dodo birds?
Same thing occured in England during the early days of WW-II, spreading out from central London.
I remember one spring morning in western Ontario seeing tens of thousands of Canada (what else) Geese spread in formations covering over 100 miles, flying north-northwest on a developmental airport surveillance radar. (How did I know they were Canada Geese? Numbers, altitude and course.)
You don't get tracks on them, the tracker rejects avian clutter, but screen shots of Doppler coded detections are pretty dramatic, with flocks to the north-northwest receding, those to the south-southeast approaching and a gradual change in Doppler with aspect in between.
We get that quite often in the morning at both EVX and TLH 88-D's here in the Florida Panhandle.We (friend of mine e-mailed me) saw this on KFWS and KSHV sites at least at about the same time one morning. Definitely *not* related, in our case, to birds leaving the vicinity of a WSR-88D site on radials leading from the site!Hard to picture a flock of birds fanning out from a central point and in a near-perfect circle.
I wonder if there were any funny meterological conditions over Green Bay when they observed those rings; makes me wonder if they didn't have a refelection of a 'RADAR TARGET' there in the bay, a reflection involving weather and a marine RADAR 'target' meant to mark a point on an water or a peninsula when RADAR is being used for navigation (as when in thick fog).
I guess it isn't that common in Wisconsin.
ping
"Chicken Run" all over again.
Couple years ago I found what is possibly the dumbest kook site on the net I've ever found - devoted to weather radar "anomalies" - basically all of which were pretty easily explainable, but which this nut saw as evidence of gubbmint weather control and chemtrails.
Could be Packer fans taking flight before the season begins, or Chicago residents leaving Wisconsin! ; )
Door County, just north of Green Bay, on the thumb of Wisconsin, is the place Illinois folks take up residence during the summer.
The standing joke is that when the Chicago crowd moves in, The Wisconsin crowd moves out.
Most fall migrations of geese usually begin about the middle of September. You can almost set your watch to the first flocks coming in. (September 21st.)
Thanks Kay!
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