China sets up world’s highest automatic weather station on Mt. Everest

Chinese expedition team led by scientists setting up the world’s highest automatic meteorological station at 8800 metres on Mount Everest. Image: CCTV.

DHARAMSALA, 5 May: China has set up the world’s highest automatic weather station on Mt. Everest, the world’s highest mountain located at the Tibet-Nepal border, known in Nepali as Sagarmatha and Chomolungma in Tibetan.

The world’s highest weather station on Mt. Everest was set up by a Chinese expedition team led by scientists at an altitude of 8,830 meters above sea level on Wednesday, media reports said.

The new station dethroned the Balcony Station as the highest weather station on Earth which was set up by American and British scientists in 2019 that sits at about 8,430 metres above sea level.

“Our mission is to set up the world’s highest automatic weather station, which fills the gap of meteorological observation of highest areas not only in China but also in the world,” Zhao Huabiao, a researcher with the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP), Chinese Academy of Sciences has said in a report on a report on Chinese state-run Xinhua.

“The station would be powered by solar energy and storage batteries” which he said “could work for “several years under normal conditions”.

The project co-named “Summit Mission” was fully launched on April 28. And this is the eighth elevation gradient meteorological station set up by the Chinese on the world’s tallest mountain, Xinhua reported.

“The eight stations will collect the wind speed and wind direction data, as well as relative humidity on the north side of Qomolangma, and the elevation gradient meteorological station system is of great significance for monitoring the melting glaciers and mountain snow at the high altitudes,” Zhao Huabiao, a researcher with the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP), Chinese Academy of Sciences has said in the report.

The Chinese scientific expedition team has set up three meteorological stations at sea levels of 7,028 meters, 7,790 meters and 8,300 meters respectively, earlier this year on the north side of the mountain in addition to the four stations at sea levels of 6,500 meters, 5,800 meters, 5,400 meters and 5,200 meters set up last year.

According to a report in South China Morning Post, “China has been conducting research on the world’s tallest peak since the 1950s.” And Xinhua declared “the expedition to the world’s tallest point is part of China’s second scientific research survey on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which started in 2017.”

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