Quantification of bird migration using Doppler Weather Surveillance Radars (NEXRAD)

Wind Energy is considered as the green and free energy. It can be harvested any time wherever there are high winds. One of the concerns with turbine is with birds and bats. There are reports of birds and bats fatalities around wind turbine. One way to investigate this issue is to monitor wind turbine areas. Researchers have used marine radars for this purpose. Weather radars commonly known as NEXRAD have also been used for monitoring purposes. The advantage of NEXRAD is that it can provide bird migration movements over a broad geographical scale and can be accessed free of charge. This work proposes image processing based algorithm for retrieval of biological information from NEXRAD data. The method is limited to the radar range up to 80 km. It will be useful to wildlife biologists, wind farm developers and policy makers.