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World's Highest Weather Station
An Interview with Roger Bilham
Perhaps the most remote location for a piece of scientific
equipment, the South Col will now be home to the world's
highest weather station. This week, the MacGillivray Freeman
Films Everest IMAX/IWERKS Format Science Expedition will be
installing a weather station at 26,000 feet on Everest. This
station, brought to Base Camp and set up by geophysicist Roger
Bilham of the University of Colorado, will be placed on snow
and ice and embedded in a deep pile of stone to withstand the
high winds on the South Col. The station is equipped to
measure temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed.
NOVA: What is this gadget we're looking at?
BILHAM: We've got a weather package here that's been
tested for extreme conditions. Specially built for Mt.
Everest, it is designed to function reliably at minus 55
degrees centigrade, and under wind stresses of 150 mph.
We're actually not monitoring many parameters. There are three
separate temperature probes designed to tell us about air
temperatures and temperatures closer to the ground.
We have a solar radiometer that measures the radiation coming
to the earth from space. Of course, at sea level, a radiometer
will tell you about all the stuff in between you and space.
But at the top of Mt Everest there isn't much between you and
space, so it's a very reliable measure of what the sun's
pushing out. In fact there are particles of dust floating over
Everest, so it's quite interesting to see what's there. And
the other two sensors are wind direction and wind speed. With
an anemometer, the propeller thing flops around and points in
the direction of the wind.
Now the package is interesting because it was put specially
together by Campbell Scientific, one of our best manufacturers
of these things, and what they've done is they've got a black
box here, which was switched on a couple of months ago in
Boulder, Colorado and will operate for 3 years. So it's now
measuring temperature at Base Camp, and as it goes up the
mountain it will measure temperature along the way and when
it's sitting on the South Col it will be measuring temperature
and other parameters.
The whole business of predicting the weather depends on
knowing how much water vapor there is in the atmosphere and
where the winds are going, what the pressure conditions are,
and what the temperature conditions are throughout the whole
troposphere.
Continue
Photos: (1) courtesy Robert Schauer; (2-3) courtesy Roger
Bilham.
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