Research Activities

From Feb. 2008 through Aug. 2009, I was involved in the Flysafe project developing predictive models of avian migration intensity for use in a flight safety context by the Netherlands and Belgian Air Forces. This work led to the development of a web-based automated prediction system (available here) which is used by the Netherlands and Belgian Air Forces in their decision-making process regarding the scheduling of flights.

Starting in April 2011, the Royal Netherlands Air Force has provided a grant to IBED and KNMI for a follow-up project called FlySafe-2. While FlySafe-1 predominantly focused on military radars and on the Netherlands and Belgium, FlySafe-2 will work towards expanding the network by including data from European weather radars to monitor and predict migratory bird movements over a much larger area. These weather radars provide us with altitude information on bird migration with previously unavailable resolution and coverage. Thus, we are able to develop models to predict not only the hourly intensity of bird migration but also the vertical distribution of those migrants in the atmosphere.

My involvement in the Flysafe project, and prior education in weather and climate, has narrowed my research focus, and I have become particularly interested in the role of wind on bird migration. Wind exhibits both an effect on the individual bird in flight as well as on the population’s migratory decisions. Considering that portions of the timing, speed, and routes of bird migration have been influenced by persistent wind patterns, a changing climate, in which wind regimes may not behave as they have in the past, could have important impacts on species' ability to successfully migrate.

I have been researching the extent to which wind conditions have an effect on migration speed. To do so, I am considering if persistent wind conditions can explain differences in migration speeds between spring and autumn along the western migration route through Europe.

To facilitate this study, I have developed the RNCEP package to make weather and climate data more easily accessible. Using this package of functions I produced monthly wind rose maps for Europe and Africa that summarize wind speed and direction over the past 30 years in 10º x 10º subsections.

The functions in the this package allow a user to access and arrange weather data from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis and NCEP/DOE Reanalysis2 data sets. These are two long-term high-quality gridded data sets with global coverage of many important atmospheric variables. The RNCEP package contains functions to retrieve data from these data sets either for a specified spatiotemporal extent or interpolated to a point in space and time. Data are accessed via the Internet. As such, no data need be stored locally, nor must any database connection be maintained. The package also contains functions to aggregate the weather data into user-defined climatic variables and to produce contour plots of these weather and climatic data on a map. This package is available via the CRAN repository.