Can one made bird migration - weather forecast? (1 Viewer)

I had a weird thought. We all know that some weather patterns bring migrants (especially rarities!) to Western Europe. There is a century of publicly available and detailed data on weather and of occurrence of migrants/vagrants.

Can somebody make vagrant forecast as detailed as weather forecasts for rain, snow and wind?

Or somebody already tried but birds don't fit to pattern? It would be also interesting!

It's been tried a lot, often successfully, sometimes less so. Sometimes what looks potentially very promising fails to yield any birds, until you discover that the weather at their starting point prevented them from leaving in the first place.

Much depends on access to detailed up-to-date weather data (often restricted for political / cost reasons).

They still seem to have trouble with getting the weather right though (at least here in Cornwall ). I suppose that's because it's weather.

Milions are spent on the computers and data handling for weather analysis/forecasting; presumably that kind of money is unavailable for twitching purposes?!

Interesting though. Maybe another area where technology and the reduced price/weight of data loggers on individual birds could lead to much more information in future decades (if the idea is followed up).

I remember once an old mate of mine, avid seawatcher and big lister, called me and said 'I'm going to Pendeen, optimal conditions, everyone is predicting massive movements' so we went and saw probably 2 Manxies and a Sooty all day



A

Nutcracker said:

Sometimes what looks potentially very promising fails to yield any birds, until you discover that the weather at their starting point prevented them from leaving in the first place.

Click to expand...

Then one could compare two points: starting place and Western Europe.

This is normal data analysis, something commonly done in business. I am sure there are many birders who know data analysis around.

The real difficulty may be that birders tend to spend free time in the field, not running models.