Dr. Elske Tielens

But you can go back 50, 60 years to early years of using radar and find studies of people identifying this.

Even when people first started using radar and thinking about it as a tool to see

planes flying over, folks would report, man, we're seeing these things we call angels on the screen because they're these echoes and they don't correspond to a plane flying in.

And so it must, if it's something that you can't see, so maybe it's an angel, right?

And it turned out actually, those were mostly birds that showed up.

But that was before we thought about biology as being visible on a weather radar.

Yeah, it sort of depends on when you're looking.

You definitely see huge abundances of insects migrating, especially when you're looking in the fall.

A lot of the abundances come from winter.

Insects that are coming up from Wisconsin or coming up from Minnesota and moving down to escape the cold weather, the cold winters that they get up there.

But in the middle of the summer, it's just activity of local populations that take to the sky and fly really high up.

And so it sort of differs at different.

You have different insects maybe that are really abundant at different times of the year.

So you can get these mayfly explosions over the Great Lakes just for a couple of days.

Or if you're looking sort of out west, you see big numbers of grasshoppers that show up on the radar really well.

Yeah, totally.

There are definitely different species in these different areas.

And I think one of the things that's striking is the U.S.

is such a diverse place.

There's so many different regions and so many different biomes included in the vast network of weather radars that we have.