vol2bird is an algorithm that calculates vertical profiles of birds and other biological scatterers from weather radar data. vol2bird is written in C.

See these publications for a description of the methodology:

Bird migration flight altitudes studied by a network of operational weather radars
Dokter AM, Liechti F, Stark H, Delobbe L, Tabary P, Holleman I
J. R. Soc. Interface, 8, 30–43, 2011, DOI 10.1098/rsif.2010.0116

Recent algorithm extensions and integration with the bioRad R package are described here:

bioRad: biological analysis and visualization of weather radar data
Dokter AM, Desmet P, Spaaks JH, van Hoey S, Veen L, Verlinden L, Nilsson C, Haase G, Leijnse H, Farnsworth A, Bouten W, Shamoun-Baranes J.
Ecography, 42, 852-860, 2019, DOI 10.1111/ecog.04028

Use the vol2bird installer to install vol2bird and all its dependencies:

It currently supports:

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 21.04
• Ubuntu 18.04 & 18.10
• CentOS 8
• RedHat 8 (see RedHat Prerequisities below)
• Mac OS Intel

Browse source code at:
https://github.com/adokter/vol2bird

Report a bug at: https://github.com/adokter/vol2bird/issues

• data contains two polar volume radar files for testing
• doc documentation on ODIM hdf5 data format
• docs html pages of this documentation
• docker scripts for generating and running a Docker container for vol2bird
• doxygen doxygen configuration for generating this documentation
• etc contains the user configuration file options.conf. Put your own modified copy in your working directory to run vol2bird with non-default settings.
• lib contains the main library
• pgfplugin product generation framework (PGF) plugin for the BALTRAD system
• pyvol2bird is a python wrapper for the library
• src contains main executables for vol2bird (main program) and rsl2odim (converts NEXRAD to ODIM data format)
• tests unit tests for pgfplugin

Copyright 2010-2022 Adriaan M. Dokter (Cornell lab of ornithology, University of Amsterdam) & Netherlands eScience Centre

Contributors: Anders Henja, Jurriaan H. Spaaks (NLeSC), Lourens Veen (NLeSC), Iwan Holleman (KNMI & Radboud University)