Weather equipment developed at the Mount Washington Observatory is now installed on top of the highest mountain in the Americas, Argentina’s Mount Aconcagua.
In mid-February, a team of scientists and climbers summited Aconcagua and installed equipment that will keep track of weather conditions. The sensor on that equipment that measures wind speed was developed by a team at the Mount Washington Observatory.
Keith Garrett, the observatory’s technology director, said the unit was originally designed to survive for one year, unsupervised, on Mount Everest. It spent a year at Camp Four before getting a tune-up and being sent to Argentina.
The instrument looks like a small cylinder. It’s similar to ones that the Observatory builds to measure wind in cold, icy, high-wind conditions. Those use a lot of energy to stay ice-free, Garrett said.
“The challenge with this particular project for Everest and Argentina was to downsize that into the bare minimum components to be successful for deployment in very remote locations without power,” he said.
Garrett said Mount Washington was perfect training grounds for the expedition. Some of the expedition’s leaders even did a practice run on Mount Washington before the installation of the equipment on Mount Everest, testing out tools and getting familiar with setting up equipment while wearing thick gloves.
“From what I know, there is very few places on the planet that even come close to the extremes and the regularity of the extremes that we experience pretty much every month of the year,” Garrett said.
The equipment now on Aconcagua will help improve forecasts and provide data that scientists will use to understand the water cycle in the central Andes, according to organizers with Project Wayra, the group that organized the installation of the weather sensors.
The region that the weather stations are monitoring has faced a mega-drought since 2010.
“This ground-breaking scientific project will allow researchers and policymakers to better understand water resource availability as water storage in glaciers and seasonal snowpack continue to decline,” expedition leader Baker Perry, a climatologist at the University of Nevada, said in a press release.
The station on Aconcagua will work alongside a network of other stations in the Argentinian Andes.
