Risking extreme weather for science

By Beverley Wang

updated 4:07 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2007

MOUNT WASHINGTON, N.H. - It’s a curious fact to know about yourself — how much wind you can withstand before you get knocked off your feet.

But it’s information that can save your life if your office is the weather station at the top of Mount Washington, where hurricane-force winds blow more than 100 days a year, and where the wind has been clocked at a world-record 231 mph.

Meteorologist Ryan Knapp’s limit has been calculated at 112 mph, based in part on his body size. And he knows what can happen when he exceeds it: In October, he was walking alone around midnight outside the Mount Washington Observatory when the wind flattened him and the precipitation measurement container he was carrying went flying.

He was able to grab the container and finish the job. Back inside 15 minutes later, Knapp watched the instruments surge as the wind kicked up to 158 mph, or 23 mph faster than Hurricane Katrina when it came ashore.

“If I had been out there during that, I probably would not have been making it back to the building,” said Knapp, one of four weather observers who live and work at the observatory on the Northeast’s highest mountain.

At 6,288 feet, Mount Washington is only one-third the size of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak. But Mount Washington sticks up like a big toe at a point where storms from the north, south and west collide. As a result, it has some of the most ferocious weather on Earth, with snow and ice even in the summer.

Observers began recording the weather there 137 years ago, when the U.S. Signal Service, the military precursor to the National Weather Service, set up shop at the peak, long before winter woolens gave way to Gore-Tex. The building where the men worked still stands, with thick chains buckling it to the mountain rock.

Nicholas Howe wrote about one storm in January 1877 in the book “Not Without Peril.” Winds of 150 mph knocked out windows and lifted a carpet a foot off the floor. Fearful of being swept away, the men “wrapped themselves in blankets and quilts secured with ropes and then they tied on iron crowbars lengthwise as further strengthening against the long fall that seemed inevitable.”

The Signal Service’s tenure on the peak ended in 1892. Forty years later, volunteers revived the observatory, setting up quarters in an old stage coach building. In April 1934, observers working there clocked the wind at 231 mph, the world’s highest recorded wind speed along the ground.

The nonprofit observatory is the heir to that project. They young staff members are paid little and work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, performing hourly outdoor observations and maintaining equipment.

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