Research expedition braves world’s worst weather

Submitted by Hal Needham
Phone: (907) 474-7942
06/08/06

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Mount McKinley Project has endured its share of horrific blizzards, heart-stopping ridge ascents and the unrelenting burn of a blazing sun during the past four seasons of weather station installation.

The participants in the project, which is funded by the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, climb to 18,700 feet, just below the 20,320-foot summit of Mount McKinley, to perform upgrades to the weather station perched upon the tallest peak in North America. It’s one of the three highest-altitude meteorological stations in the world.

With continued support from the National Park Service, this year the project team returns for a fifth acquaintance with McKinley. The expedition commenced June 7 and will last until the end of the month.

In recent years the equipment at the station contained two components, a weather station to record meteorological data and a telemetric component to broadcast data to a base station in Cantwell. The weather station failed at some point during the previous four seasons, causing researchers to modify its design. Last year, although the telemetry worked well, the data contained obvious inaccuracies after September.

This year’s weather station design includes two anemometers, or wind-measuring devices. One is a standard instrument with three rotating cups and the other is an ultrasonic device, which measures wind speed by monitoring a signal sent between two sensors. As they work side by side, these anemometers will reveal information about sensor accuracy.

The Mount McKinley Project started about a decade before it was funded by IARC. Yoshitomi Okura, who is affiliated with the Japanese Alpine Club, started the project in the early 1990s after three of his friends were blown off the mountain and killed. One of the most famous Japanese climbers, Naomi Uemura, also disappeared at about the same location.

Tohru Saito, a liaison with IARC who will ascend McKinley for the fifth consecutive year, stated, "Okura is passionate about collecting data from McKinley, both to understand the nature of the fierce winds and to prove that climbers like his friends were not inexperienced, they just faced incomprehensible conditions."?

CONTACT: Hal Needham, Geophysical Institute Public Relations Specialist: (907) 474-7942 or via e-mail at hal@gi.alaska.edu