Using bird flight to sense fine-scale complex atmospheric flows

At the intersection between flight behaviour and mountain meteorology, this project aims to 1. achieve a profound understanding of soaring flight in complex atmospheric flows, 2. demonstrate the use of bird flight to sense fine-scale atmospheric conditions.

Description: This project started in 2023 as a tight interdisciplinary collaboration between the MPI of Animal Behaviour and the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC) at ETH Zurich. This project brings together a large high-resolution movement dataset of golden eagles in the Alps with a high-resolution weather model made available by MeteoSwiss for the same region (COSMO). This ongoing project involved so far a bachelor student and a research assistant from the IAC, as well as a master student from the University of Konstanz, who are working in parallel on the meteorology side and the behavioural side of the analysis, respectively.
Sub-projects: The different people involved in this large project are working on different aspects of the analysis and on different focus areas. The areas of interest that are being covered so far involve: a characterisation of the different uplift sources available in a region of complex topography such as the Alps; the classification of fine-scale flight behaviour of golden eagles in relation to different uplift sources; the potential use of birds’ climbing rate to inform wind vertical speed in weather models.