Inferring the state of the aerosphere from weather radar

Abstract

Weather surveillance radars (see Chap. 12) are indispensable tools for characterizing the state of the aerosphere-the lower layer of the atmosphere used by flying animals-owing to their ability to remotely sense in-flight insects, birds, and bats at unprecedented temporal and spatial scales. The increasingly worldwide distribution of weather radars, their improving hardware and software, decades-long datasets, and capacity for revealing vertical and horizontal distributions make them well suited to mapping populations and movement from local to continental scales and for correlation with global datasets in other specializations like meteorology and geography. However, doing so requires care in processing the data and removing radar echoes that are unlikely to be biological. Moreover, radar design and the geometrically unique nature of their observations necessitate corrective methods for producing comparable data. Nevertheless, a parallel progression of meteorological and aerecological studies of how best to analyze radar data in spite of these observation inhomogeneities continues to yield fruitful research and new algorithms, continuously enhancing the ability to gain new insight into animal behavior in the aerosphere.