Stuart said -

<cut>

>One part that might be of interest to tweeters, since they can help
>out, is the timing of migration for a lot of shorebird species. The
>Canadian weather people have a program which runs on their
>supercomputers which tracks airflow on a global basis. Thje program was
>developed with incidents like Chernobyl in mind to predict where clouds
>of dangerous chemicals / radiation etc might end up. Anyway there is a
>severe lack of observations which might accurately pin-point when
>western sandpipers are migrating along the Pacific coast. If more data
>was gathered then the numbers could be plugged into the program to work
>out what weather conditions the birds are exploiting - particularly
>what heights they might be flying at and what the energy costs in doing
>so are.

>This applies to more or less all the other species using the Pacific
>flyway as well.

>So what are you waiting for !!!!!!

Stuart - As an employee of the "Canadian Weather Service" or
Atmospheric Environment Services (AES) as it is called up here, I must
tell you that you had better have a good chunk of change in your pocket
if you ever want them to run their back-trajectory model for you on
that wondrous NEC supercomputer back in Montreal. As you are no doubt
aware, governments worldwide are being forced to cut budgets to meet
deficit targets. AES is in the process of cutting 4,500 jobs. The major
victim of the cuts was the service side of the program. The upshot is
that very soon, the only free weather information in Canada will be
weather warnings, and the Day 1 and Day 2 forecasts as given by an
automated telephone answering device. Anything above and beyond that
, including talking to a real person, will cost you money. Beyond the
fee-for-service, the fact is that there is not much idle time on those
NECs...80% of their uptime is spent number-crunching - lots of numbers.
So, yes, I suppose you could put forward a proposal to the Canadian
Meteorlogical Centre to use their computer to calculate back-
trajectories for migrating shorebirds. But be prepared to be quoted an
astronomical price, and then be prepared for them to say NON anyway.

- Jack



Jack Bowling
Prince George, BC
CANADA
jcbowling at mindlink.bc.ca