Cloudy, with a chance of flying ants: bugs in Met Office computer
WHEN Met office radars identified rain over the South East on a cloudless, sunny day, they were initially baffled.
But what at first appeared to be raindrops turned out to be flying ants, in clouds so dense they had fooled the Met Office’s supercomputers.
A trawl through social media revealed hundreds of posts from people complaining about hordes of flying ants in the areas where “rain” had been spotted.
In mid-july, ants grow wings and fly high in the air, swarming together in the sky to mate.
This causes a nuisance for those trying to enjoy a fine day outside, as they are prone to landing in drinks and on books and other surfaces.
They are often spotted by sunbathers as they prefer to travel in hot, dry and humid weather. The annual phenomenon is referred to as “flying ant day”.
While many complained this year, Chris Packham, the BBC presenter, rebuked those who railed against the insects, reminding his social media followers that they were “harmless” and “ecologically important”.
The ants are a key food source for birds in the summer, and sometimes colonies of up to 15,000 can be in the air at the same time.
This year’s swarms appear to have come thick and fast, as the Met Office experienced small “rain” alerts in dry parts of the country all week, followed by a major alert in the South East on Friday.
A spokesman for the Met Office told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s an annual event where they come out of the ground and fly into the air at the middle of July. It’s when they do their mating.
“When our radar is detecting rain we send a beam down, it hits the droplet and sends the beam back.
“When it was sending the signal this morning our rain gauges were dry, there were no clouds in the sky, it was sunny. So it was hitting something else in the sky and sending a signal back.”
The spokesman said that meteorologists found the answer on Twitter, adding: “We looked into what it was, looked into reports on social media where people were reporting flying ants and sending pictures and videos.
“We can also look at the shape of the object in the sky and they were coming back not as raindrop shapes, they were longer and more insect-shaped.
“We could say that they were insects but couldn’t say they were flying ants until we saw the information on social media.”
This phenomenon has happened in previous years, and sometimes the swarms become so significant they can be seen from space.