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Topic Title: How pelicans glide above waves
Topic Summary: (why summer flatness sucks, explained with math)
Created On: 04/29/2021 08:56 PM
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 04/29/2021 08:56 PM
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ww

Posts: 16088
Joined Forum: 08/17/2007

Wave-slope soaring of the brown pelican Published in Movement Ecology, Springer Verlag. Research from UC San Diego.
 04/30/2021 08:20 AM
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CurtisEflush

Posts: 841
Joined Forum: 09/28/2012

Title should be more like "Why pelicans glide above waves"

1) Pilots have known about the efficiency of using "ground effect" for decades.
2) Glider pilots have known about the benefits of any "updraft" (vertical component of wind vector) for ages.
3) It's damn fun.

But cool to see them quantify the energy savings, and very cool to see the math behind it.
 05/03/2021 10:30 AM
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Bamboo

Posts: 7986
Joined Forum: 07/24/2003

Why - because it is Fun!! I love it!
Maybe there is a little Jonathon Livingston Seagull type aspiration to be better thrown in, too.

Ground effect has been known about since 1904 when the Wright brothers were flying their Wright Flyer II. When I was in school a fellow aero major who was an avid glider pilot wrote his thesis on soaring birds and had a whole section on pelicans gliding on the updrafts of incoming waves and how the waves generated those updrafts, he also did a section on birds of prey in the desert using thermal updrafts...and then tied that all back in to how these birds represented different aircraft design features and how nature has done a lot of the research for us.





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If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC - KV
 05/03/2021 11:48 AM
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ww

Posts: 16088
Joined Forum: 08/17/2007

The author of the paper had been a physics undergrad at UC Santa Barbara. Reasonably good bet that he surfs.
 05/04/2021 10:30 AM
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WG

Posts: 37257
Joined Forum: 03/10/2005

the stuff of my dreams

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill
 05/04/2021 03:44 PM
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Cole

Posts: 68176
Joined Forum: 07/22/2003

I love to watch vultures use the updrafts on the Kissimmee river and the Frigates use them in the Florida Keys.

I heard a strange buzzing noise when I was out in the sticks one day and it turned out to be the vibrations from vulture feathers as they dive bombed at an ungodly speed. They would ride the heat generated updrafts and then tuck and go on bombing runs till they were 50 feet from the ground, then swoop up and repeat. It was absolutely amazing.

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I was right.
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