It’s a bird. It’s a plane. False alarm, it’s a swarm of mayflies and midges. As the air grows cooler and damper during Northeast Ohio summers, these two critters leave their homes in the bottom of Lake Erie to live outside the water for a few days. When enough mayflies or midges swarm at once, they appear on weather radars in Northeast Ohio, says National Weather Service Cleveland meteorologist Rick Garuckas.
“A radar sends out a pulse of energy that looks for any particles or objects in the atmosphere, whether that be raindrops, hailstones, snowflakes — or could be other objects, such as insects or any sort of debris in the air,” he says. “Insects are small; the radar is not gonna be able to detect individual insects. But if there's a big cloud of them, like a swarm of mayflies or midges, that's dense enough where the radar is going to reflect it back, and we'll see a light green or blue return.”
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It has become an annual tradition for Northeast Ohio summers to include a visit on the weather radar from mayflies and midges. Mayflies are generally much larger than midges and are a sign of a healthy lake, as they are sensitive to pollution. Midges typically emerge earlier and form loud humming clouds that are drawn to light.
“You typically will see them in the evening, at sunset, when they go up into the sky and make swarms or big clouds of them — and that's when we'll typically see them on radar,” Garuckas says.
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(Photo courtesy SR Photies via Flickr)
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