Aloft data
Published January 21, 2025 | Version v2
Dataset Open

BALTRAD_VPTS - Vertical profiles of biological targets derived from European weather radars

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Research Institute for Nature and Forest
  • 2. ROR icon University of Amsterdam
  • 3. ROR icon Finnish Meteorological Institute
  • 4. ROR icon Swiss Ornithological Institute
  • 5. ROR icon Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research
  • 6. ROR icon Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute
  • 7. ROR icon Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
  • 8. ROR icon Lund University

Contributors

Data curator:

  • 1. ROR icon Research Institute for Nature and Forest

Description

BALTRAD_VPTS - Vertical profiles of biological targets derived from European weather radars is a vertical profile time series dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). It contains animal movement data derived from 151 European weather radars in 18 countries, with varying coverage from 2012 to 2023. These data were created by processing weather radar data - provided by the Operational Programme for the Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA) - with methods optimized for extracting bird targets. The resulting data are vertical profile time series (VPTS), containing the density, speed and direction of biological targets within a weather radar (radar) volume, grouped into altitude bins (height) and measured over time (datetime). The data are also available in the Aloft bucket.

See Desmet et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04641-5) for a more detailed description of this dataset.

Files

VPTS data in this deposit are organized per country (.tgz file), radar (directory), year (directory) and month (.csv.gz file). Fields in the data follow the VPTS CSV format and are described in vpts-csv-table-schema.json. An overview of what data are available is provided in coverage.csv. Radar metadata can be found at https://aloftdata.eu/radars/.

  • coverage.csv: coverage of the VPTS data, representing the number of unique hours, heights, source files and records for each radar and date combination.
  • vpts-csv-table-schema.json: technical description of the fields in the VPTS data.
  • be.tgz: VPTS data from 2 radars in Belgium.
  • ch.tgz: VPTS data from 5 radars in Switzerland.
  • cz.tgz: VPTS data from 2 radars in Czechia.
  • de.tgz: VPTS data from 20 radars in Germany.
  • dk.tgz: VPTS data from 5 radars in Denmark.
  • ee.tgz: VPTS data from 2 radars in Estonia.
  • es.tgz: VPTS data from 15 radars in Spain.
  • fi.tgz: VPTS data from 13 radars in Finland.
  • fr.tgz: VPTS data from 26 radars in France.
  • hr.tgz: VPTS data from 7 radars in Croatia.
  • il.tgz: VPTS data from 1 radar in Israel.
  • nl.tgz: VPTS data from 3 radars in the Netherlands.
  • no.tgz: VPTS data from 11 radars in Norway.
  • pl.tgz: VPTS data from 8 radars in Poland.
  • pt.tgz: VPTS data from 3 radars in Portugal.
  • se.tgz: VPTS data from 22 radars in Sweden.
  • si.tgz: VPTS data from 2 radars in Slovenia.
  • sk.tgz: VPTS data from 4 radars in Slovakia.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was processed using infrastructure provided by the University of Amsterdam, SURF Cooperative, Ghent University and the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). It was mainly supported by the GloBAM project, funded through the 2017-18 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND programme.

Notes

This version adds a coverage.csv file.

Files

coverage.csv

Files (47.4 GB)

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1.5 GB Download
md5:c5926121625a1011cd1987e495278e79
274.2 MB Download
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11.2 MB Preview Download
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989.5 MB Download
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7.9 GB Download
md5:643acbbff7bc9c5f1e04942cb81fbfeb
2.3 GB Download
md5:36838891149f41fbade2d52007867698
1.0 GB Download
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689.4 MB Download
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6.9 GB Download
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11.8 GB Download
md5:2313598de8bb583e47e83471f13c632f
970.6 MB Download
md5:a1eed5248a1acc3fee5038bff380225b
271.9 MB Download
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2.9 GB Download
md5:46b5d3d4978c99142501ddce9bb7c819
2.0 GB Download
md5:a359eee4754f5d11985399949159494d
197.4 MB Download
md5:273db9047ff670c5541faa775a8e2490
169.1 MB Download
md5:0b29483e1cd2f36568c1105c0447db05
5.7 GB Download
md5:4486a3efe7e1984ca5a68b5096ec27b8
732.5 MB Download
md5:691c87c495347f8c1f5a1c1930a0c980
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md5:f94e2865bb363c56f37e1b4cd87edba2
7.2 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Is compiled by
Software documentation: 10.1111/ecog.04028 (DOI)
Software: 10.32614/CRAN.package.bioRad (DOI)
Software: https://github.com/adokter/vol2bird (URL)
Software: https://github.com/enram/vptstools (URL)
Is described by
Journal article: 10.1038/s41597-025-04641-5 (DOI)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.14711244 (DOI)
Is variant form of
Dataset: https://aloftdata.eu/browse/?prefix=baltrad/monthly/ (URL)

Funding

Belgian Federal Science Policy Office
GloBAM - Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting global biomass flows of aerial migrants BelSPO BR/185/A1/GloBAM-BE
Dutch Research Council
GloBAM - Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting global biomass flows of aerial migrants E10008
Swiss National Science Foundation
GloBAM - Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting global biomass flows of aerial migrants 184120
Research Council of Finland
Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting Global Biomass flows of Aerial Migrants GloBAM 326315
U.S. National Science Foundation
Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Biodiversity Scenarios: Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting Global Biomass flows of Aerial Migrants 1927743
Research Foundation - Flanders
LifeWatch LifeWatch
Dutch Research Council
LifeWatch 19025
Dutch Research Council
e-Ecology Virtual Laboratory 2021.030