Evaluating uplift proxies to quantify atmospheric support for flight

Flight is a costly behavior. Atmospheric conditions, namely the speed and direction of horizontal and vertical air currents, play a major role in determining these costs. Flying animals constantly adjust their flight behavior to exploit the energy available in the atmosphere while avoiding conditions which increase their costs of flight. As such, quantifying the physical characteristics of the atmospheric is crucial for studying the ecology of flight behavior.
The aim of this project is to bring together the expertise of ecologists and meteorologists to explore the commonly used proxies to quantify atmospheric uplift in flight behavior literature. For each proxy, we provide a description of its meteorological definition and relevance for flight behavior. We also present the sources for obtaining atmospheric variables and the methods for calculating each proxy. Additionally, we conduct a comparison between these proxies and empirical flight data of soaring birds to draw conclusions about their usefulness, considering the various spatio-temporal scales of the available environmental variables.