Yesterday morning, near sunrise, a strange circular feature suddenly appeared in the weather radar over eastern Washington between Kennewick and Moses Lake (see below). A band of precipitation was to the east.
A sequence of radar images shows the rapid development of this feature between 6:30 AM and 6:42 AM and it was gone by 7:27 AM.
So what is going on here? An alien presence? The meteorological version of crop circles?
As Sherlock Holmes would say: "The game's afoot!"
First, piece of information. Sunrise yesterday morning at Moses Lake was at 6:36 AM.
The second piece of information is that skies were clear immediately over the circle (see visible satellite image at 7 AM with a star over the location).
Nearby cams confirm the lack of clouds:
Invisible aliens that appear near sunrise?
Ready for the big reveal?
It was birds and the feature is called a roost ring.
Birds are social creatures and often spend the night together to rest in huge groups, sometimes numbering in the thousands. The resting spots usually have bodies of water.
The center of the ring yesterday morning is shown by the red arrow below....a nature area with lots of lakes.
A picture from the ground is shown below. Nice location for birds.
In the morning, at sunrise, the birds fly off in many directions, producing a circle in the weather radar, which essentially picks up the reflected signal from the birds at one elevation.
In my next blog, I will take on related topics:
Many years ago, with a group riding horses, we were 30 miles WNW of the roost ring and approached a lake surrounded by Sandhill cranes. With our appearance, the cranes launched and rose above the lake – spiraling upward. The flock went higher and higher – until they were small dots in the blue sky. Then they were gone!
ReplyDeleteWingspan can approach 80 inches (~200 cm), weighing 10 pounds (~4.5kg).