Fly radar

Interesting post in the news last week on RADAR. It's well known that RADAR can be used for weather monitoring. Applications like Met Eireann's rainfall radar limit the chances of getting a soaking on a short walk to the shops (vital in Ireland!).

What is maybe not as well known to most people is that RADAR signals can be polarized, and that dual polarization RADAR can help to gauge the size of hail, rain drops and snowdrops. I'm not a Meteorologist, but I assume that

big drops = a soaking.                                                     (1)

But this was the first example I had seen of it being used to monitor insects.

Important notes: (A) they don't specify that it's dual polarized RADAR and (B) I'm sure it's been used to monitor insects for years - but DPol sounded most likely and insect monitoring hadn't caught my attention before!

The amount of insects - Mayfly in this case - that must be present to register that strongly is hard to imagine. They explode, seem to start in the south and end up in the North (a temperature difference maybe?) and are gone just as quickly. Mayfly spend most of their life underwater and only surface for one day to breed and then die. Here's a photo that should demonstrate the type of numbers they were looking at...

Cool visualisation!