Friday 14 Sept 2012 Diurnal Addendum

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Back on the 12th i put in the post the Barn Swallow fly-out at dawn along the Willamette River in southern Yamhill County brought to my attention by a one Paul Sullivan on the OBOL listserve.

Today he points this out again.  So i have put the radar returns he references below because you can not access that data from the Wunderground website he points to after a certain period of time lapses — they don’t store more than a day’s worth of data it appears.

If you are interested in getting past radar data go to the side bar under the Weather heading and pull up Real-Time Weather.

4 thoughts on “Friday 14 Sept 2012 Diurnal Addendum”

  1. Hello, I’m an amateur birder and novice bird photographer in Davis (Yolo County), Calif. (95618), adjacent to the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area. We have a very active local listserv chronicling the terrestrial scene, as you know. I’m interested in reading more about using radar to track migration. Is anyone doing this in the Calif Central Valley and posting about it? Thanks! And thank you for this site.

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    • Hi Sylvia:

      As far as i know there isn’t anybody publicly providing commentary on radar returns during migration in your area.

      However two things:
      1) If you read the information provided on this and the web sites i link to — you can pretty much do it yourself.
      2) With a bit of tech savvy you can start your own and the “Birdar” network can help get you set up.
      If the second is something you are interested in let me know and i’ll see what i can do to make that happen for you.

      Oh, and i am subscribed to CVBirds, but only really follow it in the spring. When the birds are heading north, they have to pass by you folks first.

      Cheers!
      greg haworth
      portland oregon

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  2. Hi Greg:

    Thanks for your helpful reply!

    I am interested in possibly setting up a Birdar for the Central Valley. Sounds like a good winter project. Where can I get info on what’s involved before committing?

    Also — I’m Mac. I have a good PC in the house but it’s my teen son’s… Birdar v. Reddit… Is Mac OS conducive to this?

    Sylvia

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    • Well, that would be really cool if you can swing it.

      It can be done without animated gifs by just going to one of the radar sites and copying a few radar images to your computer and posting them to your blog. I did that for a season or two.

      If you want to post the animated gifs then you need a script that will strip the data from the radar website, and recompile them sequentially as a gif. That script is what the Birdar network can provide you.

      You will have to schedule it to run on your, or an accommodating website, so you can retrieve the file each day or write another script to have it emailed to you — which is what i did.

      So the hurdles are:
      you need to have the desire and the time
      you need access to the internet — done
      you need to know where to get radar images — all kinds of links can be found
      you need to have a blog – easy, just sign up for one of the free hosts like WordPress or Blogger
      and that’s it — unless you want to publish animation loops

      then

      you need to have a domain or access to one
      you need to aquire or write your own script to strip and compile the images (Birdar can provide a php script)
      you need to schedule it to run at the end of the day
      you need the ability to retrieve the file

      If i can be of any further assistance just let me know. You can continue to post here, but feel free to email me directly:
      g.haworth at gmail dot com

      Cheers!
      greg haworth
      portland oregon

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