But Dr Dial wanted to be sure, so he compared the accomplishments of normal partridges with birds that had their wing feathers clipped to half their normalsurface area, and to even less fortunate fowl whose main flight feathers were entirely plucked.
Storm surges have the potential to be dangerous because they involve a great upwelling of a stretch of ocean - intense low pressure at the heart of a storm literally tugs the sea surface above its normal level to create a massive bulge.
Greenland's surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet.
In this, the stream of video and audio data is recorded as a series of minuscule spots on the disc's surface that have been gently fried by a laser beam and turned from their normal crystalline condition to an amorphous state that has different reflective properties.
Weather officials said they are hopeful for normal rains as there is no threat of El Nino, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters that disrupted even distribution of last year's monsoon rainfall.