Installing the World’s Highest Weather Station with Professor Baker Perry, PhD

Richard Jacobs: Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. Today, my guests are Baker Perry. He is the co-lead of the meteorology team of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. He was on the high-altitude climbing team that installed the world’s highest weather station. Perry is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He has led or co-led 21 research expeditions in the tropical Andes and along with the local collaborators, he has installed and maintained 5 meteorological installations at elevation 5000 meters, which at quick calculation is probably about 18,000 feet. So, it’s pretty high up and then Tom Matthews. 

He is also a National Geographic explorer and was the co-lead of the meteorology team of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition as well. He was on the high-altitude climbing team that also installed these weather stations, the highest in the world on Mount Everest. Matthews is a climate scientist and a lecturer at Loughborough University in the UK. He has an interest in glacier climate interaction. Matthews also researches extreme weather from storms to heatwaves and is working on improving public communication in climate change. For today’s interview, I just have Baker Perry though, Tom wasn’t able to make it but I wanted to make sure that he was also mentioned. So, Baker, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. 

Baker Perry: hi, Richard, it’s certainly a pleasure to be here. I look forward to talking.  

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. So can you climb Mt. Everest by yourself? The whole way? How often are you out there, mountaineering and stuff?  

Baker Perry: I have been a lifelong mountaineer but have only been on Everest for one year and that was last year with the National Geographic expedition and we did not make it to the summit but we did successfully install the highest weather station in the world at the balcony which is just about 1300 feet below the summit and it was my first time above base camp on Mt. Everest but I have been to the Everest region once before. I do have much more experience in the Andes, Peru, and Bolivia, the multiple expeditions for weather stations we‘ve set up there previously. But having the opportunity to go to Everest with such a multi-disciplinary expedition, with National Geographic was quite an experience, to say the least. 

Richard Jacobs: Oh yeah. Were you guys going to try the summit if you could or were you not even thinking about doing that? 

Baker Perry: Well, the summit was always there. That was certainly not the major goal of the expedition. We’ve had two major sites that we were considering for the installation of the highest station. One was the South summit, which again, is not the summit itself. The summit really wasn’t practical or feasible to install a weather station at the summit because of the snow up there and we needed a rock to anchor into. Also, it’s not appropriate necessarily either due to the fact that it’s the highest point. There is symbolic importance to it and done so from the space considerations and other considerations, we’ve never really looked at the summit itself. The South summit was possible and the balcony was aside as well. So, we opted for the balcony simply because of the traffic jam, the slow pace of the lawn ahead of us just did not allow us to get up quite as high.    

Richard Jacobs: Okay, yeah, then you started to put an antenna in this summer and you are right, then you’d have like maybe an Empire State building situation or Chrysler building where they put the antenna to make it higher than the other buildings. That’s not the point and I understand it would probably ruin things for a lot of the people wanting to summit it but just personally, I wondered if you wanted to summit it; to say, you did since you were close. 

Baker Perry: Yeah, I mean certainly personally, there was an interest in trying to get up to the summit but that was secondary to fulfilling the scientific objectives. So, our approach all along was okay, if we have the time, if the route is in a favorable condition and we are able to complete our scientific objective with the installation of the weather station, then yeah, I think that would be something considered but that was not the primary reason we were there. 

Richard Jacobs: Right. So, what does the weather station consist of? Is it a whole big unit or an antenna or what is it? Why did you put it in there? 

Baker Perry: Yeah. So, we actually installed a network of five weather stations starting in the community of Phortse which is 12,000 feet and going all the way up to the balcony. In the lower two stations where we are much more involved, we have a set of comprehensive sensors to measure permutation and whether it’s raining or snowing. We also had snow depth sensors with it and then, standard meteorological instrumentations and wind speed sensors, temperature, relative humidity, pressure, solar radiation and then, as we moved up from the second-highest station which was at base camp, we moved the station to Camp 2 and at Camp 2, we are obviously limited by the amount of equipment that we can take there. 

The site itself is more limited, we were just; all we could really find was a small outcrop of rock to anchor things on to. So, by design, we had to cut down the sensors we took up to Camp 2. Now, it’s still possible to use some conventional tripods that could float in on a helicopter but above Camp 2 is where it got really interesting. Up at 26,000 feet and 27,600 or so, certainly, no helicopter can drop a load there and we are limited to what can be carried on our Sherpa’s back. so, the design that we came up with for those upper 2 stations consisted of a very lightweight tripod of aluminum that had been engineered and we also had a separate pelican case for a datalogger or the brains of the weather station and then another pelican case consisted of a battery and a charger and then those were bolted directly to the rock at the lower level and the rest of the station, we built on consisted of 2 solar panels. 

One was oriented due South and then, we had two different temperature sensors, one relative humidity sensor, a pressure sensor, and at one of the stations in the South, we had solar radiation sensors and then we had more wind sensors. 

Richard Jacobs: Did you have an oxygen sensor?

Baker Perry:  No, we don’t have oxygen but the pressure sensor beacon, that’s a pretty good, just the overall atmospheric pressure, pretty good. 

Richard Jacobs: What was the reason for putting it in? Was it that no one knows what the weather is like at that elevation or is it just to provide a lot more accurate weather conditions on Everest? 

Baker Perry: Yeah, it’s a combination of factors. I think you are absolutely right and the first statement is that we really don’t know what the conditions are, at some of these highest elevations, in terms of weather and longer-term climate even though there is a huge volume of ice stored in glaciers up in the Himalayas, there are only a handful of weather stations that are found at those elevations and prior to our expedition, there was no weather station, up at the highest elevation or above about 10,000 feet. So our installation certainly fulfilled a critical void in just data coming in. I mean it’s one thing to have data from aircraft and satellites and weather balloons over the atmosphere and we have some of those observations from South Asia and the world but that’s not the same thing, we are talking about direct surface observation and these mountain weather stations are absolutely critical for understanding how the climate is changing and also improving our forecast models and models of glacier change to give us a sense of what the watery picture may look like down the road. 

But now, the other point you referenced is that these weather stations also play a critical role in a climber’s safety and there have been a couple of attempts previously to monitor the weather conditions, to South call, the station in 2008 and it was the highest in the world for quite some time and lasting. So, we have some intermittent observation from that effort but they are not continuous and that station was destroyed but in small pieces of rock be picked up and hurled against it and so, we don’t have as long a record or as complete a record as we would like. So our network installed gives us real-time observation and with the amount of time, they’ve already been set up and we have observation directly compare with forecast models and in a paper, we’ve recently published in the Bulletin of American Meteorology, we show how our observations can already be used to improve the weather forecast. Ultimately, we hope that it will improve a climber’s safety and allow composition on when the best windows are a go for the climber. 

Richard Jacobs: So, how long have these weather stations been active since you put them up there, any interesting insights? At night, the pressure drops so much that it’s too dangerous to go or what’s been noticed?

Baker Perry: So, these stations have been up for just over a year and we completed the highest installations at the end of May in 2019 and some of the insights that we’ve learned; I mean one of the ones that we report in recently published papers is that the solar radiation coming, solar radiation is incredibly intense and when I say intense, I mean those that have climbed and spent time in altitudes, especially in the Himalayas or perhaps in the tropics and Andes know that the sun is intense and you feel that when you are out there in it. But to actually have measurements to quantify this up at 26,000 feet puts it in a different perspective in the sense that the measurements that we have made and observations we have up there from the weather stations tell us that at times, solar radiation is more intense than what we would expect at the top of the atmosphere. The reason for this, presumably, at least we think is there are multiple reflections coming in, there are multiple pathways from adjacent snow and ice-covered slopes and clouds that can result in incredible intensity. 

The significance, the broader significance of this is that even when temperatures are well below freezing, at lower on the mountain and higher up on the mountain, even when those temperatures are well below freezing, melting can still occur due to this very intense solar radiation. So, that’s a very interesting finding of huge relevance for projected glacier change. In fact, there is already melting occurring even though the freezing level is well below the tops of peaks indicates that some of the models that are used to project future changes in glaciers still may need to be revisited. 

Richard Jacobs: I don’t know if this is the case but I wonder if because of the solar radiation up there, if oxygen is broken and turned into Ozone and if people are up there, they’re literally breathing different air chemistry. Maybe nitrous oxide is formed more and maybe that’s not just less oxygen that’s the problem. Maybe you are literally breathing the noxious ozone and maybe that’s the problem. 

Baker Perry: Well, in some recent work that my colleague Tom Matthews is leading does suggest that the Ozone values up there are exceptionally high, particularly in the spring climbing season. So, there may be some other interesting facts that come out of these analyses and the observation and I think it’s the tip of the iceberg with some of our work especially with our colleagues on the biology side and on the glaciology, side begins to dig into their data that more. 

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, so in terms of climber safety, does this now suggest the best times to the summit and times to avoid, will you coordinate this where let’s say, a group wants to summit, I would think they would check this weather station first and they would tell them, now is a good time or they would tell them, no, don’t summit now. It’s very dangerous for various reasons.  

Baker Perry: Yeah, absolutely and I think that was one of the motivations on the National Geographic side from the beginning is to have a way to provide real-time observation from these areas and we continue to work closely with the Government of Nepal and in particular their department of Hydrology and Meteorology to share these insights, share their data and there is hope that they will then use these insights to issue a more detailed climber forecast for the region and certainly, as the data is publicly available in real-time and the publication we are working on is distributed to a wide audience, the hope is that the private sector meteorologists are also forecasting for expeditions will be able to also make a decision on the mountain. That’s certainly our hope. 

Richard Jacobs: I wonder if you could make a miniature weather station that you could sow onto someone’s hat or glove or something. So, literally, you could monitor as they go all the way up, up and down from the summit at least. Places where you normally wouldn’t put up a permanent weather station. What their personal climate is like; I wonder if that would be an interesting thing to do or could be done to get more data. 

Baker Perry: Yeah, absolutely. There is a growing opportunity to use personal sensors or microsensors. I’ve got some colleagues that are using some of these for stress and cold stress occupational states and we did carry some sensors that actually, super small, one or two inches long sensor that has a data logger inside it and there is a temperature probe that extends from it that I would carry, I would put that outside my pack. So we did experiment some with that and one of the major problems with the temperature at least is that because of the intense solar radiation, that any sort of temperature probe needs a radiation shield. It needs to be shielded from the intense radiation to get a measurement. So that’s one of the major challenges but certainly, there are options to do that. 

Richard Jacobs: Have people quantified the physiological impact of summoning in terms of the amount of extra radiation absorbed, in terms of again, what you breathe and the low pressure and etc. Has it all been fully quantified? 

Baker Perry: Yeah, I mean that there has been quite a bit of work on the physiology at high altitude. It has been published and a lot of that work was done in the 60s, the first American to geographically roll in. So the impact on the human body are fairly well-understood. There are still opportunities to fill in some holes but it’s bee less well documented on the climate’s side and the atmospheric side has been less well studied and those are some voids that we are trying to fill with the expedition and the subsequent data now. 

Richard Jacobs: I’ve heard, on Everest, there is a lot of garbage and stuff that has been discarded. Oxygen tanks and God forbid, maybe people who have died up there. Is it messy up there or is it pretty clean? I don’t know. Is there any way or reason to monitor what’s up there and clean it up periodically or is that not at all part of the mission?

Baker Perry: Well, there is no question that over the years, the waste and trash has accumulated and this was very bad at base camp up until probably the last 10 or 20 years and to be honest, I was pretty amazed at how to clean base camp was and the area around base camp. There has been a monumental effort on behalf of climbing companies themselves, the Government of Nepal, the National Park, and local communities to clean up a base camp surrounding environment and progress is being made higher up on the mountain. It’s a lot more challenging at Camp 2 because this is above the Khumbu icefall and standard procedures to carry trash are used, equipment and goods is backed down through the icefall and this tremendous physical, it’s been a little slower cleaning up too but it’s progress, progress being made and then there is still quite a bit of trash up at south call but again, that’s vastly improved but it has been to my understanding that oxygen containers have been carried down and expeditions are given incentives to bring trash down and so, it’s a process and I think that we are seeing it get a little better each year and that’s very encouraging. 

Richard Jacobs: That’s great. alright, now to the climate on site. So we talked a little bit about what you said, a lot of ozone up there, solar radiation, for our overall climate, now that we have literally like an eye in the sky up there, what are we seeing that we didn’t see before? 

Baker Perry: Well, what we are seeing now with these stations is that we tell exactly when the subtropical Jetstream, for example, is over the region and we can infer this from times in the past by using satellite imagery and by using what we call re-analysis data from the models. But to have that eye in the sky is critical and the same thing with solar radiation and the temperature and these other variables providing just tremendous insight into what the climate is at the highest peak in the planet and I think that I shared some of the initial insights already with respective intense solar radiation but what we are also learning is that a lot of the so-called disappearances of climbers in the past, then fully explained may be tied to wind gusts, high wind gusts. In fact may balloon, keep people off the mountain or off their feet and caused a fall and so that is a very relevant finding and then, of course, the hope is that these stations continue to operate for some period of time, so we don’t just get a snapshot of one year or so but can have a longer-term insight due into the weather on the roof of the world. 

This will become particularly important as our colleagues at the University of Maine begin to analyze the ice core, the highest ice core in the world that they recovered from the South call because the weather stations provide a critical context of the current climate and that aids in the interpretation of climate going back in time and the reconstruction from that ice core. So, I am really excited that I’ve begun to work more closely with them as labs open back up and we get data coming back from that ice core. 

Richard Jacobs: One more question on Everest. How many weather stations are there geographically spread out over Everest and are you able to create like a picture now, of the climate of most of the mountain, and how it varies around the mountain? 

Baker Perry: That’s a great question and certainly we set up the network of 5 stations on the Nepal side that extends all the way down into the lower Khumbu and the town of Phortse. There is also; there are several stations maintained by French glaciologist Patric Vaughnon and colleagues from Tribhuvan University in Nepal that are on the way up to base camp and so, combined with those, we are definitely substantially improving the density of observation and also the Chinese have been working on the Northside of the mountain. In fact, last year, right after we had installed the station at Camp 2 and this was just over 21,000 feet, 6000 and I’m getting all my conversions mixed up. So I will stop there. I was just thinking in meters but it’s just over 21,000 feet. We installed that weather station, we returned to base camp and we were super excited, it was a great spot, the installation went well and we shared the news with our expedition leader Dr. Paul Mayevski but he patted us on the back and said congratulations but I just had words with our Chinese colleagues on the other side that they installed a station 100 meters higher than you. 

So that was just last year and so, it’s fantastic to see efforts taking place on the Chinese side as well and we are in communication with those researchers and continue to analyze data and we have not yet gotten access data from the Chinese station for this year. 

Richard Jacobs: So, what I was going to ask you is hopefully, Nepal and the other countries that own parts of the mountain essentially will say that we demand a collaboration, so we can see the climate around the mountains at all times. I’m sure that it would lead to a lot of interesting science because I don’t know of anyone that’s mapped a mountain; put up a bunch of weather stations at a mountain that looked at the climate and how it’s different around the different faces and different rocks and crags and all that. It would be very interesting to see. 

Baker Perry: absolutely and when combined with the work that our mapping team has competed with the drone mapping and helicopter LIDAR mapping, this is the most detailed mapping and analysis of a glacier in the world. Some of those resources from the National Geographic but I mean there is an incredible opportunity here to tell the story how the Khumbu glacier on the south side of Mt. Everest has changed over the last 50 years for these different data sets and to take the viewer into the glacier using virtual reality and to have these sort of immersive experience, to see up close and personal, how the landscape is and the models think it may change the data sets that are collected in putting people into this environment. 

Richard Jacobs: Very good. How can people check out, I know National Geographic has a fil of it, so Expedition Everest, where is it? How can people look at it and find out more? 

Baker Perry: The Expedition Everest TV special premieres on Tuesday, June 30th, 10 PM Eastern on the National Geographic Channel and I encourage people to tune in to that to learn more about our team and the science. National Geographic also has a comprehensive website with real-time data links to the weather stations and a number of videos highlighting the work that this team has completed and so I certainly encourage your listeners to check out those resources as well. 

Richard Jacobs: Pretty good. Baker, last thing, what’s your next mission? Do you have any other places where you will be going or are you going to be back home for a while, hanging out, looking at data? 

Baker Perry: Yeah, that’s a great question, and Tom and I both had planned to be back on Everest this spring in April and May, maintaining the weather stations, doing some upgrades, and just checking on things but of course, the world has changed a bit in the last few months and so that expedition is on indefinite hold and so I am taking advantage of this time to just be out at our family’s farm and doing lots of research and writing up results from the exciting data that we’ve been collecting. I’ve also been growing a big garden and spending a lot of time with the family. So, beyond that, I do hope to get back to Everest at some point and then other regions that we are beginning to look at for possible field expedition, the Karakoram, Pakistan, Indus River Valley which is studied, high mountain of the world, and huge given headwaters of Indus and major rivers there and also in South America, returning to the Andes, Chile, trying to prove hydrological variability. 

Richard Jacobs: Very good, Baker. Thanks for coming on. It’s a really cool project that you’ve been involved in man. I appreciate it. 

Baker Perry: Hey, Richard, it’s a pleasure to talk with you and I enjoyed it very much and I hope you enjoy the show.