Incessant cicada shrill alarms a Georgia town. Fox News' Steve Harrigan has the details. Cicadas have taken over large swaths of the United States, interrupting sleep, causing car crashes and even bombarding President Biden on Wednesday as he prepared to board Air Force One. Trillions of the insects have emerged after 17 years underground in approximately 15 states, leaving nymph exoskeletons littered around city parks and backyards. The red-eyed bugs are especially active amid hot weather conditions that have swept the country in past weeks and residents of heavy cicada areas have taken note.

Tens of millions of birds make migratory flights for the winter each year, often flying during nighttime. They're frequently spotted by the National Weather Services' network of 159 ground-based radars, which scan the skies every 4 to 10 minutes by emitting pulses of microwaves and measuring their reflections. However, ecologists have historically struggled to make use of the resulting data sets because of their sheer magnitude, which can range up to hundreds of millions of images and hundreds of terabytes over decades. In an effort to lighten the workload, scientists at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology and the University of Massachusetts' College of Information and Computer Sciences recently investigated an AI system capable of distinguishing birds in radar images from precipitation. They say that their tool, dubbed MistNet after the fine nets ornithologists use to capture migratory songbirds, not only aids with classification tasks, but can be used to estimate birds' flying velocity and traffic rates.

Archived data from the WSR-88D network of weather radars in the US hold detailed information about the continent-scale migratory movements of birds over the last 20 years. However, significant technical challenges must be overcome to understand this information and harness its potential for science and conservation. We present an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm to reconstruct the velocity fields of birds migrating in the vicinity of a radar station. This is part of a larger project to quantify bird migration at large scales using weather radar data.