Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is most likely
People ask me to look into weird things all the time. Since I operate a weather business that specifically offers weather radar analysis and tracking software, I got asked to look at this image from a Daily Mail article which claimed: Weather experts baffled by mystery plume on New Mexico radar near 1945 nuclear bomb test site
An animation of the plume follows:
I’ve seen images like this dozens of times before.
It is very likely a large swarm of birds taking off. The first two frames are the giveaway. When birds take off from the ground, they are tightly packed from their feeding/roosting area. When they go aloft, they immediately spread out, and that is exactly what we see in the first two frames of the animation. Compare it to Figure 2 in the article below and the animation below and you’ll see what I mean.
Source: NWS Doppler Radar Detects “Roost Ring” on Green Bay
A similar dramatic roost ring was documented on August 10, 2006. And there was a similar event during the Oklahoma Earthquake in Nov 2011.
Our sensitive NEXRAD WSR-88D Doppler Weather Radar network is routinely capable of picking up bird swarms like this, something we couldn’t see with older WSR-57 and WSR-74 weather radars. The NEXRAD system can also pick up bugs and bats that exhibit typical swarm behavior. We’ve all seen huge swarms of birds that blot out the sky, so of course they can be picked up by weather radar looking for rain, since birds, like humans, are mostly made up of water.
It could also be insects, such as these examples:
Weather radar catches massive bug swarm
A vast swarm of bugs that covered much of the northern half of the North Island last night and this morning has been caught on the Metservice weather radar.
MetService didn’t know what it was and entomologists were puzzled.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8340259/Weather-radar-catches-massive-bug-swarm
And: A huge hatch of mayflies on radar:
![188179688_75ca4f94c5[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/188179688_75ca4f94c51.jpg?quality=83)
![gg080111[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gg0801111.gif)
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1683&dat=20060707&id=3LkoAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MUUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2110,3731197
From NOAA:
Bird Detection via Doppler Radar
Angie Enyedi (radar animation by Jason Deese)
National Weather Service Jacksonville
Doppler radar transmits pulses of energy into the atmosphere, and when this energy intersects a target, information about the density (radar reflectivity) and motion (radar velocity) of the target is transmitted back to the radar (Figure 1). Most of the time the Doppler radar beam intersects targets composed of water vapor, including clouds, rain drops and hail stones. Meteorologists utilize this data from the radar to interrogate storms, which makes the Doppler radar a critical component of the proactive severe weather warning service that the National Weather Service (NWS) provides.
Sometimes, the radar beam intersects other objects, including birds. When there is a high density of birds in one location, typically during bird migrations, sometimes as the birds take flight the radar beam intersects the flock. This happened in several locations across coastal Southeast Georgia on the morning of October 25, 2009, right around sunrise. This is a favored time for birds, particularly waterfowl, to leave their nocturnal nesting sites on bodies of water to either continue their migration or return to their favorite daytime refuges.
The animation (Figure 2) illustrates two large and one smaller area of birds taking off, as detected by the NWS Jacksonville Doppler radar. In addition, there is a Google Map (from Google Earth) to reference for location (Figure 3). It appears as though the southernmost flock arose from the Satilla River near Woodbine, while the other flock ascended from a tributary of Buttermilk Sound, just west of Little St. Simons Island. A third, but smaller flock, appears to have flown from the western side of Cumberland Island National Seashore.
Many bird enthusiasts utilize radar imagery to track migration patterns. Radar imagery has also been helpful to both birds and humans regarding aviation safety. Most airport terminals use radar data to track birds as they cross flight paths to avoid collisions.
Click here for more information on the NWS Doppler Radar.
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UPDATE: For those of you who say bird swarms can’t be that big…
Reader JohnS notes:
Submitted on 2014/03/19 at 4:05 pm
The playas at 34.655294° -105.900141° might be good candidates for a starting point, since they are probably wettest around this time of year. Note the line of bird choppers to the south.
REPLY: Good candidate, here is the satellite view, clearly a seasonal wetland: http://maps.google.com/?ll=34.759666,-105.867004&spn=2.008193,1.972046&t=h&z=9
Windsong says: March 19, 2014 at 3:36 pm
Large flocks migrating at night quite common in my area. Some interesting images here: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/09/mega-bird-migration.html
I’ve reproduced the relevant parts from Cliff Mass, who writes:
Starting with the radar image (composite of all altitudes) at 7:49 PM Saturday night, we see a lot of ground-clutter returns (the lower radar beams hitting the surface mainly).
About an hour later (9:09 PM) and after sunset, things have really changed. Lots of echoes and some very intense. These are the birds. Birds don’t like to migrate offshore very far and you can see that in the echoes.
12:22 PM the echo coverage has expanded. Lots of birds on the move
5:37 AM there are still some birds, but the numbers are dropping.
And after sunrise at 6:39 AM, nearly all are gone and we are back to ground clutter
The Langley radar is a Doppler radar and it gives the velocity of the targets (in this case birds) towards or away from the radar. Here is the Doppler image at 12:46 AM. Green indicates approaching and red and orange going away. Clearly the birds are heading south!
Now let me show you something interesting. Here in Seattle we have a very special type of weather radar, called a radar-wind profiler, located at the NOAA facility at Sand Point. Instead of sweeping horizontallly, this radar has three static beams, mostly facing upwards. This radar picks up birds as well. Take a look at an image from this radar for the 24-h ending mid-day Sunday. The y-axis is height in meters and time is on the x-axis (in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, UTC), 06 is 11 PM, 12 is 5 AM, etc.). Stronger returns are in purple, blue, and green. The birds are obvious. Around 03 UTC (8 PM) we we see the start of the bird echoes. Lots of flying in the evening, which fades a bit in the middle of the night. But you see a complete collapse after 5-6 AM as it starts getting light out.
I have no idea whether the radar loop in question is caused by bats, but we can see the bat emergences from a number of colonies in central and southeast texas on doplar weather radar almost every night. There are several urban colonies in bridges (i.e. Congress Avenue in Austin, Waugh Drive in Houston, and McNeil Bridge in Round Rock) that are clearly visible nearly every night, despite the ground clutter in the area. In a wide open area like New Mexico, a half million or more bats would make a very strong echo on radar, and they have been documented flying up to several hundred miles in a single night in pursuit of insects. One project in the area southwest of San Antonio was able to track bats flying at low altitude for well over a hundred miles south after emerging, then rising up to ~10,000 feet to feed on moths being carried in from Mexico on winds blowing northward. The bats were riding back towards their roost while feeding, and did not return to the roost until just before sunup. We see similar behavior in emergences in the Houston area, where the bats at Waugh Drive nearly always fly directly upwind initially upon leaving the bridge.
Generally, you would expect the bats to disperse as they leave the colony on radar, but if they are travelling towards the radar site, as the radar clip in question shows, the returns would increase as due to the decreasing distance, and could appear to strengthen, even as the bats disperse with time. That is true of any of the explanations for the radar loop in question. The apparent increase in strength of the signal as it approaches Clovis may simply be a function of decreasing distance from the radar. The only situation where I would expect bats to stay more concentrated would be if they were tracking a swarm of insects that had just hatched from playas or wetlands nearby that was being blown to the east by the wind. The maternity season for central Texas bats appears to be timed to coincide with the migration of corn earworm/cotton bollworm moths from Mexico, so it is conceivable that bats in New Mexico could be tuned into similar insect hatches and movements there as well. If the same radar echoes are coming from the same locations multiple nights in a row with varying intensity just after sundown, bats would make a pretty reasonable explanation.
Another interesting bat/military radar situation was Bracken Cave’s impact on operations at Randolph Air Force Base outside of San Antonio. Bracken Cave has somewhere between 20 and 30 million bats during the summer and is located on the flightline into Bracken. At one point in the distant past the military contemplated dynamiting the cave shut to eliminate the issue of the bats interfering with the radar, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed and they now [tailor] their flight operations to avoid the nightly bat emergences.
Make that “tailor”…
I am sure that this has nothing to do with the Trinity test site where the atom bomb was detonated at White Sands Missile Range. I was EOD at WSMR in the 80s and know the area well. This is northeast of Ruidoso. That a few hours drive away from WSMR. Ruidoso is up in in the mountains. We used to go skiing there. Further to the east from Ruidoso is another flat land. Basically if this was from WSMR it would have to go up and over a mountain range.
It’s ghosts. Ghosts of all the people killed by nuclear radiation.
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Or a flock of birds.
If you look at NOAA image for that day it was a HaBoob that started at the Seria Blanca’s and blew east towards Texas, it was huge winds blowing up dust.
Check the Correlation Coefficient. CC was in the range of 0.4 to 0.45 and winds were from the west at ~ 20 kt. at ~5,000 ft. I thought birds typically produced a CC value higher than that but I could be wrong.
Meant to add the low Correlation Coefficient seems more in the range expected for chaff than for birds. Chaff released by light artillery perhaps?
This swarm doesn’t look like the other flocks, or dust. All images show a swarm area of about a thousand square miles, moving with the wind at 20mph for an hour and a half: http://w1.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KTCC.html
and http://w1.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KSRR.html
Coincidentally, I suppose, the swarm heads directly for the radar. It began at dusk (converting between Zulu and MDT) after a day of heavy winds, maintaining its cohesion over several counties simultaneously, necessarily without internal communication. Looks like bugs to me. –AGF
But proximity to the radar is affecting either detection or swarm behavior. Strange. –AGF
First question: why do the images stop at 0300Z? –AGF
A flock of birds covering over 3000 square miles and reaching peak speeds of 84 knots?
I guess New Mexico must be special…
Magma says:
March 20, 2014 at 6:08 pm
Maybe with a 50 knot tailwind.
http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/expert/previous/fastest.aspx
Just kidding.
New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment & (Space) Aliens is indeed special. Its governor Susana Martinez has taken a lot of flack for her policies on human aliens. She has guts & I hope she runs for president.
re: agfosterjr says March 20, 2014 at 1:56 pm
First question: why do the images stop at 0300Z? –AGF
What images are you viewing? There is more than one source on this thread …
Might I suggest you check a couple of my posts above on this subject?
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Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a likely source of birds.
The plume looked like it originated from the west slope of North Oscure Peak. The plume actually lofted before sunset and continued travelling east. The speed and direction of the targets indicates that they were at high altitude (winds aloft were WSW and fast, winds at the surface were light southerly). I’m thinking large bodied (very radar reflective) birds lofting on an evening thermal. If you track the “plume” across Texas toward Oklahoma you’ll see the “sunset spike” on the base reflectivity loop followed by blooms of clutter consistent with spring nocturnal bird migration (relative velocity puts low altitude targets on a northerly heading at about 20). The “plume” from New Mexico travels across Amarillo and then drops out near the OK TX border.
Here are some pictures overlaid on a newscast (below) that try to pinpoint where the anomaly originated.
http://imgur.com/a/JP3gC
video via Dailymotion
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ijzi8_3-20-2014-mystery-plume-explodes-from-new-mexico-military-base_tech
Using Google Earth I see that there is an airfield within 2 miles of where I estimated the plume originated. http://i.imgur.com/i6Q2OGr.jpg 33.751479, -106.232175
Re. Jim and Eric:
Eric’s link helps; Jim’s and mine have been updated and are useless now. –AGF
About 3 seconds into Eric’s second link ( http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ijzi8_3-20-2014-mystery-plume-explodes-from-new-mexico-military-base_tech ) there appears to be what might be interpreted as bats returning to base after feeding. –AGF
My first guess when seeing that the plume originated at or very near North Oscura Peak was that it was a high altitude chaff deployment having to do with testing their ability to track and target missiles.
I live in Las Vegas NM and travel to work in Santa Rosa, NM an hour away. That morning there was a fog like substance through out both cities. I found it strange that by the afternoon the substance was still in the air. That’s when I assumed it was dust but there was no wind that day.
[snip – that website is just too stupid and off-topic to link to here sorry, -mod]