During the 2014 fall migration season, the UMass X-Pol weather radar [1] was used to collect low elevation observations of migrating birds as they traversed through a fixed antenna beam. The radar was run during the night time, in clear-air conditions. Data was coherently integrated, and detections of biological targets exceeding an SNR threshold were extracted. Detections without some dominant frequency content (i.e. clear periodicity, potentially the wing beat frequency) were removed from the sample in order to isolate observations suspected to contain a single species or bird. For the remaining detections, parameters including the polarimetric products and the Doppler spectrum were extracted at each time step over the duration of the observation. Clustering techniques were used to determine the extent to which observations fell within distinct groups, based upon the extracted parameters.
The presence of strong clusters of avian radar echoes, based upon selected parameters, would suggest the potential for a broad, species based avian classification algorithm. Such a classification scheme could ultimately help select and monitor wind sites in order to minimize harm to at-risk bird and bat species.
References
[1] V. Venkatesh, S. Palreddy, A. Hopf and K. Hardwick, "The UMass X-Pol Mobile Doppler Radar: Description, Recent Observations and New System Developments," in Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2008. IGARS 2008., Boston, 2008.
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