Abstract
Shutting down wind turbines during major bird migration events is expected to be an effective mitigation measure to reduce the number of bird casualties. Hence, this measure is proposed to be implemented at a large scale in Dutch offshore wind farms. The energy market demands that such a drop in energy needs to be known well in advance. Therefore, the University of Amsterdam developed a bird migration forecast model to predict bird migration at the North Sea 48 hours in advance. This forecast model has an autumn and a spring module, both delivered in 2022. Waardenburg Ecology was asked to validate the autumn module. This report summarizes the results of this validation and provides suggestions for the improvement of the bird migration forecast model. This version of the report is an update of the first concept after correcting for differences in how the ECMWFand ERA5 weather models deal with the rain parameter.