Analysis of mixtures of birds and insects in weather radar profile data

Weather radars are increasingly used to study the spatial-temporal dynamics of airborne birds and insects. These two taxa often co-occur and separating their contributions is crucial for reliable interpretation of their movement patterns. Most studies have restricted analyses to locations, seasons, and periods in which one or the other taxa dominates. In this study, we describe an analytical method to estimate the proportion of birds and insects in cases where both taxa share the same airspace. Our approach partitions vertical profiles of biological reflectivity into bird and insect components, using assumptions of downwind heading selection by insects and information on expected airspeeds for birds and insects. We evaluated our method in regions, where existing approaches of studying bird migration with weather radars can be particularly challenging due to high airborne insect density: the tropics (Colombia) and the southern temperate zone (Southeast Australia). We found that bird and ..., We obtained Colombian weather radar data including both single polarization moments (radial velocity and reflectivity) and dual polarization moments (correlation coefficient, differential reflectivity and differential phase) from the country's Institute for Hydrological, Meteorological, and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), focusing on the stations in San Jose del Guaviare, Guaviare department, south-central Colombia  (name: GUA, 2.53°N, longitude: 72.62°W, elevation: 218 m a.s.l.) and Barrancabermeja, Santander department, north-central Colombia (name: BAR, latitude: 6.93°N, longitude: 73.76°W, elevation: 80 m a.s.l., Fig. 2A). Both radars are dual-polarization and operate at C-band (5.3 cm) with a beamwidth of 1°. The radar operated in dual-PRF mode with a low pulse repetition frequency (PRF) of 1266.667 Hz and high PRF of 1900 Hz, corresponding to a Nyquist velocity of 50.6 m/s. For the Australian case study, we obtained the level-1 dataset from the Australian National Computationa..., , # Analysis of mixtures of birds and insects in weather radar profile data

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7pvmcvf4s](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7pvmcvf4s)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains the data and code required to replicate bird-insect mixture analysis from Australian and Colombian weather radar data. Data includes daily vertical profiles and their seasonal summaries of one Australian radar and two Colombian radars. Codes include R markdown files that can be used to reproduce Figure3-5 in the associated paper.

This README describes only the variables relevant to the analysis. Other variables included in the dataset are standard outputs from the R function `biorad::calculate_vp`. For details on these additional variables, please refer to the R documentation for `calculate_vp`: [biorad documentation](https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/bioRad/versions/0.5.1/topics/calculate_vp).

### Files and variables

#### File: mixture\_code.zip

**Desc...,