KING 5 Meteorologist Ben Dery made an interesting observation on the coastal radar Monday morning:
I was in the Weather Center this morning looking at radar. There were a couple spotty showers leaving the North Interior, but overall dry. Something caught my eye that appeared to be showers right along the coast. Although, it wasn’t raining. There were no surface observations reporting rain, and cloud cover was sparse. Yet radar was lit up in a narrow band along the coast between midnight and 5 a.m. What was going on?
Apparently, spring is a bird migrating season, and radar picks up on more than just water droplets. Radar picks up on lots of things in the atmosphere like bugs, sharp temperature and density changes, and even birds. Radar was picking up on the likely thousands of birds doing an overnight migration using the coast for orientation.
Related: Check weather radar
A lot of smaller birds migrate at night for safety. Under the cover of darkness, they can sneak past predators on their way back north from their winter home.
It’s interesting to know that while our radar is taking a break from locating rain, it’s still hard at work locating other things in the sky.
