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November 2022

Higher Summits Forecast Keeps Climbing School Leader in the Know

Paul McCoy guides ice and rock climbing, mountaineering, and ski outings in the White Mountains. He relies on Mount Washington Observatory forecasts to anticipate weather and keep people safe in the backcountry. If you value these forecasts, consider supporting our mission.

Long before reaching treeline, Paul McCoy has a good idea of what to expect from the weather. A climbing school leader in the White Mountains, he takes groups ranging in skill to higher summits throughout the winter climbing season. Harsh weather often comes with the territory. Getting caught off-guard by a storm system, preferably not.

McCoy is on Mount Washington at least once a week, mostly on the Pinkham (eastern) side, guiding ice and rock climbing, mountaineering, and ski outings. Given the many variables of leading groups to elevation in the Whites, anticipating weather systems plays a key part in his backcountry safety plan.

“We don’t cancel our trips up there, but it’s important to know if it’ll be blowing 100 mph,” said McCoy, who heads the International Mountain Climbing School (IMCS) of North Conway and their annual Mount Washington Valley Ice Fest.

Just because his guides don’t cancel doesn’t mean their groups make it to the summit every time. If they have to turn back, that’s part of the adventure.

“In 12 years of guiding, I’ve never had someone on a horrific weather day say, ‘Oh man, I’m so disappointed I didn’t make it up’,” said McCoy, adding, “It’s enough just to feel that wind.” Hurricane-force winds at 74 mph or greater happen every other day, on average, from November through April on Mount Washington. Weather systems sweeping the mountain have taken many lives and put others perilously close.

McCoy and his guides use the Higher Summits Forecast, published twice daily by Mount Washington Observatory (MWO), to gauge what’s ahead and prep clients before they hit the trail.

“It’s the most accurate forecast around. I use it all the time, anytime I am going up high,” said McCoy, who also volunteers for Mountain Rescue Service, whose technical teams check Observatory forecasts when heading to a rescue.

A core MWO service, the Higher Summits Forecast gives a detailed written and audio summary of current conditions and any expected storm systems in the range’s alpine zones. It also provides a quick glance at daily high and low temperatures, wind chill, wind speed, and wind direction.

The MWO night observer/meteorologist on duty at the observatory’s summit weather station writes the first forecast before 5:00 a.m. Leading up to that, the observer quality-checks data, analyzes weather patterns, and heads out in the elements every hour, all night, to record conditions and visibility.

The weather is always changing and people’s safety can hang in the balance. Knowledge is power. If the wind chill is 40°F below zero, McCoy knows his clients won’t likely summit, but they’ll give it a go anyway, knowing they can always turn back.

When the sun goes down early in winter, he doesn’t have time to play around at higher elevations. The forecast helps him know how to adjust plans to keep people out of harm’s way and “make sure they have gas to make it back.”

MWO’s other forecasts assist with different types of outings. When ice climbing at lower elevations, McCoy monitors the Mount Washington Regional Mesonet to evaluate wind direction. With westerly winds, he knows the east-facing Huntington Ravine will be sheltered. The mesonet, MWO’s network of remote weather stations in and around the White Mountains, continuously collects weather data at various elevations, indicating if climbing at 6,000 feet will be different than 4,000 feet, helping McCoy predict difficulty.

“I use all those features to depict what ice climbing will look like,” he said. Before heading to lower-elevation spots like Crawford Notch or Frankenstein Cliff, he uses MWO’s Mount Washington Valley Forecast. McCoy made sure to point out that while accurate, a forecast is still a forecast, not to be “taken as gospel.”

“It’s a tool, and the more you climb in the higher summits and the ravine, you can look at past forecasts and the surface of bowls to tell if climbing will be good or not,” he said.

In addition to forecasts at mountwashington.org, a quick summary of current Mount Washington conditions is available by texting “weather” to MWO’s main number, 603-356-2137. Text “forecast” to get an abbreviated summit forecast. Text “weather forecast” for both.

If you value these services for yourself, outdoor enthusiasts, or the rescue teams who put themselves at risk to help others, consider a donation to Mount Washington Observatory, a private, nonprofit institution. Donations from members and corporations are an important source of funding that directly support the continuation of forecasting, climate data, and educational work at the summit of Mount Washington.

Always keep in mind that mountain weather is subject to rapid changes and extreme conditions. Forecasts are tools to help you plan a safe trip. Travel with adequate clothing, shelter, food, and water, and be prepared to make your own assessment of travel and weather conditions. If in doubt, turn around.

McCoy guiding Whitney Gilman Ridge in Franconia, NH.

Mountain Washington’s Response to Climate Change Now ‘Statistically Significant,’ Research Shows

Observatory Provides the Only Data Source for Measuring Climate Trends on White Mountain Peaks

By MWOBS Staff | December 28, 2021

A Sept. 2021 view of Mount Washington from the summit of Mount Monroe, with Lakes of the Clouds below the summit cone. Researchers rely on Mount Washington Observatory’s near century-long data set to track climate trends in the White Mountains. If you value this work, consider supporting our mission.

Given the Northeast’s quickly warming climate, a key question attracting the attention of scientists like Georgia Murray is, how are mountains responding?

Are summits of the White Mountains warming as quickly as lower elevations? Or are these peaks—with their diverse weather conditions, unique alpine environments, and immense appeal to outdoor enthusiasts—enjoying some degree of protection from climate change due to their height in Earth’s atmosphere?

Getting to answers starts with long-term data. Unfortunately, as Murray and her colleagues point out in a recent study, the shortage of data collection at remote mountaintops hinders understanding of higher summit responses to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions during the last 170 years.

“Long-term and robust meteorological measurements in the Northeast mountains are sparse,” writes Murray, a staff scientist at the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). “Fortunately, the summit of Mount Washington has one of the longest (since 1932) high-quality montane data sets in the world.”

Mount Washington Observatory (MWO) remains the only active meteorological station above 2,300 feet in the mountainous regions of New England that has both an extensive and continuous climate record.

“The quality of the data is exceptional. There is no other upper-elevation data set that can really compare,” said Murray when we caught up with her recently.

In their recent paper, “Climate Trends on the Highest Peak of the Northeast: Mount Washington, NH,” lead author Murray and her colleagues build on previous studies of MWO’s data set, which now spans nine decades. They incorporated new meteorological data collected over the last 15 years at the Observatory’s summit weather station (6,288 feet) and nearby Pinkham Notch (2,025 feet), a mid-elevation site where daily temperature and snow data have been collected since 1935.

“The comparison of these two sites provides a proxy for climate-change patterns across an elevational gradient in the northern Appalachian Mountains,” Murray writes.

In other words, although the scarcity of data at higher summits in the Northern forest remains a challenge to understanding climate change on mountains, such understanding is possible only because of the continuous data collected by MWO and the cooperative station at Pinkham Notch, combined with research like that of Murray and her colleagues.

Until now, research showed that Mount Washington’s summit had not yet tipped towards a significant warming trend, in stark contrast to sharp rates of change at lower elevations in the northeastern US, which is warming faster than other regions. As Murray points out, “80% of climate-model projections indicate that this region will cross the 2 °C [3.6 °F] warming threshold by 2040, a full 20 years ahead of the global temperature meeting this same marker,” incorporating research by Karmalkar and Bradley (2017).

Scientists believe the summit continues to be buffered from the Northeast’s exceptional rate of annual warming, but not to the extent previously shown. The recent data analyzed by Murray show that statistically significant warming is in fact taking place at both Mount Washington’s summit and Pinkham Notch.

“Warming rates and significance at both Pinkham Notch and the Summit site increased with the additional 15 years added to the record since the previous analysis by Seidel et al. (2009). Summit annual temperatures are now increasing at a statistically significant rate, although still at a slower rate than Pinkham Notch,” Murray writes. “The most recent 15 years have been the warmest period on record globally. This accelerated rate of warming regionally and in our study is consistent with the continued rise of greenhouse-gas emissions.”

The new study also adds insights about climate indicators at Mount Washington and Pinkham Notch from the 1930s through 2018, including snow season start and end, frost days, ice days, thaw days, snow depth, snowmaking days before Christmas, and growing season start and end, similar to those developed by Contosta et al. (2019).

“We used the data but looked at it from a different lens,” Murray said. “We looked at winter conditions and other indicators that people generally talk about, like snow arrival.”

All monthly minimum and maximum temperature trends were warmer, though not all significantly so, at the summit and Pinkham Notch, except for maximum temperatures during October at Pinkham Notch and June at the summit.

“We definitely are seeing the signal of climate warming at these two sites,” Murray said during her recent Science in the Mountains presentation.

The average annual temperature is warming 0.18 °F per decade at the summit and 0.25 °F at Pinkham Notch. Evidence of a changing winter season, while happening at both sites, is most dramatic at Pinkham Notch, where the average winter temperature is warming 0.40 °F per decade. This trend is consistent with what is being observed at lower elevations across the region.

On the summit, spring is warming fastest, at about 0.25 °F per decade on average.

Other climate indicators provide a sense of the condition of winter at higher elevations in the White Mountains. Mount Washington’s summit is experiencing 1.8 fewer frost days (minimum daily temperature below 32 °F) per decade and 1.8 fewer ice days (maximum daily temperature below 32 °F) per decade. The length of the growing season on the summit is also increasing at 1.8 days per decade, potentially changing the life cycle of alpine plants and flowers.

“Even though the summit has some different warming trends statistically, I think it is starting to catch up. Because of those other indicators, we think the summit will soon be on its way to warmer winters and what we are seeing elsewhere,” said Murray, who grew up in Freedom, NH and earned her master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire with a focus on biogeochemical cycling. That means she studies how elements like carbon or sulfur move through Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere and impact ecological systems.

A member of AMC’s research department, Murray focuses on science and monitoring in the White Mountains, bringing a science-based perspective to conservation and policy work, such as greenhouse gas reduction programs to address climate change.

Georgia Murray sets up AMC’s long-term cloud and rain monitoring site at Lakes of the Clouds Hut. AMC photo.

A core theme of Murray’s career entails diving deep into data to emerge with knowledge that puts climate change in a relatable context. “Understanding the impacts of climate change is very much about how we make it relevant to us. What is it doing locally, and what is it doing globally? We know it is happening, but what is it doing in our back yard.” Murray said.

On the other hand, she added, “we need to be careful about looking at local trends and not generalizing them globally but look at the whole system.”

With the AMC, her key interest is how climate change is playing out in mountains. The organization and its hiking membership care deeply about alpine environments as a resource. Access to MWO’s unique data set along with support from scientific staff at the Observatory’s summit weather station solves a critical challenge, providing researchers at AMC and other scientific organizations with the only source of continuous data for understanding how climate change impacts higher summits in the White Mountains.

If you value MWO’s high-quality data set for understanding climate trends, consider a donation to Mount Washington Observatory, a private, nonprofit institution. Donations from members and corporations are an important source of funding that directly support the continuation of forecasting, climate data, and educational work at the summit of Mount Washington.

To delve deeper into Murray’s study, watch her recent Science in the Mountains presentation.

Observatory Builds New Wind Sensors for Frontier Science on Everest

Observatory Builds New Wind Sensors for Frontier Science on Everest

In May, climate scientists and a cadre of highly specialized Sherpas ventured to Mount Everest to install new automated weather stations at the planet’s outer edge. Their packs held tripods and a load of tech. In the mix were two lightweight wind sensors custom-designed by Mount Washington Observatory.

Expedition leaders Baker Perry and Tom Matthews share a fascination with places where weather dictates everything. This climb continued their quest to measure how snow and ice are responding to the behavior of upper-atmosphere winds, including the jet stream as it meets the Himalayas.

“We need reliable measurements of wind speed and direction,” said Perry, a professor of geography at Appalachian State University and National Geographic Explorer. “With the combination of low relative humidity in winter and exceptionally high wind speeds, there is an enormous amount of snow and ice that sublimate directly into water vapor, into the atmosphere.”

The glacierized area of High Mountain Asia holds vast quantities of snow and ice, and the Himalayas act as water towers to over a billion people downstream.

Conditions at such elevated terrain make climbing exceptionally difficult. Installing weather stations in sub-freezing temperatures adds another level of complexity.

Perry described it plainly: “Once you get above 23-24,000 feet, there’s not a whole lot of fun, there is a lot of suffering.”

With the windchill dipping below -40 °F, on May 9 the climbing team led by Tenzing Gyalzen Sherpa overcame the enormous physical and mental challenges of taking fieldwork to such an extreme, successfully installing new sensors at South Col (elevation: 25,938 feet) and an entirely new station at Bishop Rock (elevation: 28,904 feet), just below Everest’s summit.

It wasn’t their first time on Everest. Perry and Matthews co-led a previous Everest Expedition in 2019, installing stations in the Khumbu region and collecting samples of snow, ice, and soil from extreme elevations. Both projects were supported by National Geographic and Rolex through their Perpetual Planet Expeditions, a partnership harnessing scientific expertise and cutting-edge technology to reveal new insights about the impacts of climate change on the systems that are vital to life on Earth.

A key part of preparing for the 2019 and 2022 expeditions involved pre-testing weather station equipment on Mount Washington, NH, against its reliably extreme weather. A subarctic environment on par with Antarctica and the polar regions, nowhere else in the contiguous United States is able to offer such readily accessible and consistently extreme conditions.

In January 2020, Perry and Matthews, a professor of environmental geography at King’s College London and fellow National Geographic Explorer, presented their first Everest Expedition at the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) annual meeting. Afterward, they met with Observatory Director of Technology Keith Garrett about the operational challenges of the stations they installed in 2019, which at the time had just stopped transmitting data.

The conversation turned to the future of measuring wind in the Himalayas’ high altitudes. They considered the feasibility of installing an Observatory-built pitot static tube anemometer on Everest.

Pitot anemometers, typically used as air-speed sensing instruments on aircraft, have been custom-developed by the Observatory for measuring wind on Mount Washington for decades. A commercial, off-the-shelf alternative that is robust enough to handle the summit’s extreme cold and icing while producing accurate wind speed measurements does not exist.

According to Perry, “the Observatory probably has more experience than anybody around the world at measuring the weather in an extreme location, and in particular, measuring the wind and developing innovative sensors and technology to maintain high-quality wind observations.”

Testing at 4000 feet on Mount Washington

After the 2020 conversation at AMS, Garrett was uncertain. “Automated weather stations in extreme conditions are hard. Many of our stations (on Mount Washington) require multiple visits per year for repairs. We have the luxury of relatively easy access and normal oxygen levels in which to work on them,” he said.

In addition to Mount Washington’s summit, the Observatory manages the Mount Washington Regional Mesonet, 18 remote weather stations that mea-sure temperature, relative humidity, and other variables.

At the Observatory’s summit weather station, staffed and operated 24/7, 365 days a year, instrumentation requires hourly de-icing and maintenance in winter. More extreme events require de-icing the pitot system as frequently as every 15 minutes to keep the data flowing.

By sharp contrast, the automated stations on Everest are at the complete mercy of the weather. Seven months after the Balcony station (elevation: 27,657 feet) was installed in 2019, nearly all of the sensors were destroyed and it went offline. Both wind sensors at the South Col (26,066 feet) were also destroyed about the same time, but not before logging a 150 mph wind gust with temperatures of -40 °F, leaving little doubt as to what happened at the Balcony. Remarkably, the remaining sensors and the station at the South Col survived two full years and even partial burial by monsoon snowfall.

Valuable data and insights had been collected, showing substantial loss of snow and ice even at extremely low temperatures.

“We have observational records from ice cores showing that the top of the core is nearly 2,000 years old, suggesting that the more recent ice may have ablated (been lost) relatively recently. The weather station data allowed us to hypothesize that this ice is missing because of melt and the increase in sublimation that has occurred as temperatures rise a little bit. And if the wind speed increases, that can raise the sublimation rate,” Perry said. “There is a fascinating combination of extreme sunshine, wind, humidity, and temperature that we now know is making the highest elevation of the planet more susceptible to loss of snow and ice.”

In a May 2021 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, first authors Perry and Matthews argue for the importance of measuring wind, relative humidity, and other variables in addition to temperature, since loss of snow and ice occurs on Everest “despite persistently below-freezing air temperatures.”

To continue collecting data from the highest mountains in the world, which Perry calls “a critical yet under-monitored cog in the Earth’s climate system,” he and Matthews contacted the Observatory in June 2021 with their request for two custom-designed, portable, low-power, lightweight, durable pitot static tube anemometers – needed in a very limited amount of time.

They planned to install the sensors on Everest the following May during the pre-monsoon climbing season, on new weather stations that would also have satellite communication devices, air temperature and relative humidity sensors, solar panels, data loggers, and other equipment.

Garrett got to work. The next few months were spent discussing instrument needs and specifications, considering the pros and cons of different aspects, and building a proof of concept. Decisions needed to be made in several important areas, including instrument heating and wind direction capabilities.

The Observatory uses a separate vane to track wind direction. A pitot anemometer with both wind speed and direction tracking would require 360-degree rotation while transmitting power and signal to and from the transducer, which converts pressure to speed data. That dual-function setup has been fraught with power issues and other complications in Mount Washington’s full conditions.

Wind direction was removed from the Everest pitot design given the short time window to source design drawings and parts, the need to reduce instrument complexity, weight, and points of failure, and the team’s primary goal to measure winds from the west. A separate wind vane on the new Everest station tripods would suffice.

Heating the instruments to mitigate icing would also mean additional equipment and weight in the expedition team’s packs. Further, heating the instrument can lead to clogging. As the heating mechanism melts rime ice, the liquid water refreezes almost immediately, often turning to solid ice inside the anemometer as experienced on Mount Washington. This creates a serious issue when no one is there to address it.

With no heat, the instruments are expected to freeze over during the monsoon months of June through September, potentially for long periods of time. Nonetheless, the team removed heating from the design with the expectation that the anemometers can survive icing and recover when the ice buildup sublimates.

During periods when the units freeze, the instruments can still provide useful data. Tracking the freeze, thaw, and operational cycles in conjunction with the other wind monitors, solar radiation, and temperature/relative humidity sensors on the stations can factor into the team’s research.

The nature of this frontier science involves many unknowns. After installing the new weather stations on Everest, Perry and Matthews have no eyes on the instruments to know what’s happening, and the time horizons for going back are long.

But the data being collected helps fill big gaps in what is understood about the outer margins of the planet, where the land surface meets the upper atmosphere.

“Mountains totally perturb the atmosphere. What we think we understand, we don’t necessarily. That’s what we’re learning from Everest,” Perry said. “There are a lot more higher elevations around the planet where snow and ice are so important to sustaining communities downstream. Satellites do not necessarily capture what’s going on.”

According to Perry, if the Everest expeditions can improve understanding of the processes driving the change, and ultimately improve projections of water availability and climate trends, that’s a real plus for planning climate adaptions and risk management.

Since completing the installations in May 2022, both the Bishop Rock and South Col stations have provided valuable data but have gone offline intermittently, presumably due to snow and rime ice buildup on the solar panels and/or satellite antennae (the South Col station was offline for nearly two months previously during the monsoon in 2020 but resumed transmissions in October).

As of this writing, the new pitot anemometer at the South Col is online and being tested with wind speeds in recent weeks nearing 100 mph. The team is cautiously optimistic that transmissions from Bishop Rock will stabilize as winds pick up and relative humidity drops.

With 90 years of experience measuring extreme weather, the Observatory specializes in instrumentation that can withstand the world’s harshest weather conditions, with Mount Washington serving as an ideal testing ground.

Mount Washington Observatory pitot anemometer

“Mountains make their own weather,” said Perry, who has climbed Mount Washington many times. “What happens at 6,000 feet in the free atmosphere is a lot different from what is happening on Mount Washington. That’s why it’s so important that we have the technology and tools to observe the weather in these places.”

Mount Washington Observatory is a nonprofit research and educational institution. Our work in mountain meteorology and climate science relies on your financial support. If you value our mission, donate today.