Keen to gather similar data for Britain, the Scottish Meteorological Society decided to build a weather station at the top of Ben Nevis. For a trial run, one particularly intrepid member scaled the mountain every day for four months – through blizzards, gales, and heavy storms – to record measurements at the summit. Funding to build the station and obtain the instruments was raised through a kind of 19th-Century crowdfunding initiative. Even Queen Victoria donated.
And so began a remarkable experiment in Victorian stoicism and scientific endeavour. From 1883 to 1904, a few hardy individuals lived year-round in a small stone hut, surviving on tinned food and making hourly recordings of everything from atmospheric temperature to humidity, wind speed to rainfall. In total they made almost 1.5 million observations – often going to extraordinary lengths and risking their lives to record data in the most hostile of conditions.
“They were living in very severe weather conditions: 100mph winds were not uncommon, the temperature would drop to -15C (5F) at times, and they lived inside a cloud for most of the year. But on the rare occasions the cloud was below them, they got the most amazing views. So I suspect they lived for those days where they could see for miles and miles around.”
Blizzards and precarious mountain paths were far from the only scares the weathermen faced. On a couple of occasions the observatory was struck by lightning. The first time, the lightning came down the chimney and set the wooden lining of the building on fire. (The blaze was extinguished.)
Feeding the original Ben Nevis weather data into a computer model requires all the observations to be digitised. And so thousands of volunteers across Europe have helped digitise the observations over a period of just 10 weeks in autumn 2017.
As a result, Hawkins’ team is now looking at how the amount of moisture in today’s storms compares to those in the late 19th Century. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and so when it rains in a storm today, we expect the amount of rain to be much greater compared to a storm a century ago, of the same severity,” he says. “It’s a fingerprint of how things are changing in a warmer world.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180320-what-scotlands-ben-nevis-can-teach-us-about-climate-change
Those were some dedicated scientists!
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