Michael, Jeff Wells, and other radar enthusiasts, For British Isles radar data, you can check the UK Met Office website here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/radar/index.html
By clicking on the radar locations, you can see the local radar scans rather than the composite radar image for the UK. This is where I would look to find radar imagery, but having never lived in the UK or had much need for looking at radar imagery in that country, I am not familiar with many of their radar websites. Some of their radar sites are Doppler radars. For a complete list check on page ten of this UK Met Office Radar document: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/library/factsheets/factsheet15.pdf The problem with looking at these radar images is that they are filtered by the Met Office to remove "ground clutter". This is often the same range of reflectivity where birds show up, so they are likely removed from the imagery displayed on the web. It is specifically stated in their fact sheet that drizzle often isn't seen on their radar imagery, this usually means that most birds are not going to show up on their radar imagery (that is displayed on the web). On a slightly different topic, ever since Jeff Wells emailed this list wondering where to get radar imagery for other locations in the world aside from the US, I have been trying to track down all the radar locations for the globe and plot them in Google Earth. Being able to find the radar locations is one thing, but finding the radar imagery that is real-time and readily available on the net for those sites can be impossible in some instances. African radars are notorious for this, because there isn't enough money, parts, and know-how to repair the radars if anything goes wrong with them. You may wonder why I am only plotting the locations of the radars. I am only plotting locations, because I was hoping the community might be able to help find the radar imagery sources. Not being familiar with each country's weather service makes it hard to find images, and not every country has a weather service either which makes it even harder to find the images in some instances. Other countries make their radar imagery available only to citizens accessing the imagery from that country. If anyone knows where to get radar imagery for the radars found in the Google Earth file, please let me know. I know currently where to get radar imagery for the US, the UK, Canada, South Korea, Australia, Israel, and Malta, with a few other leads. This is not yet the entire radar set, but I will be updating the file through time and hope I can come close to a complete dataset for the globe. Having said all this, it isn't clear that every country will have radar imagery that isn't filtered, so it might be like the UK imagery that tries to filter out the "clutter" (including birds). Here is a link to the radar locations file: http://homes.comet.ucar.edu/~guarente/Google.Earth/Radar/Radar.Locations.Network.Link.kmz Open that file in Google Earth and you will see placemarks (thumbtacks) for all the radar ocations I have found, before I had real work impede my work flow on this side project. If you have any questions about Google Earth use, or radars, feel free to ask. Bryan Guarente Meteorologist and Instructional Designer The COMET Program University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Boulder, CO -- NFC-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES Archives: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nfc-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NFCL.html 3) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NFC-L Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
