Pieces of Logan are now among the frigid temperatures, snow, wind, and ice of the world’s tallest peaks.
At the top of Mount Everest, and more recently, Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, sit weather sensors built, tested and engineered by Campbell Scientific, a worldwide provider of rugged data loggers and data acquisition systems headquartered in Logan. The work is part of an effort to understand how weather and snow conditions on mountain peaks affect water supplies and climate in surrounding areas.
“These regions have lots of snow and ice that’s found up high, just like in the western United States and Utah, too, that is critical for sustaining communities downstream,” said Baker Perry, a climatology professor at the University of Nevada-Reno who led the Everest and Aconcagua expeditions.
Perry said climate change is affecting snow and ice in these high-altitude regions, but scientists have little data from such extreme environments outside the polar regions. The stations, built and tested in Logan by Campbell Scientific engineers, provide continuous, real-time weather measurements that will help researchers understand how melting snow and ice influence water availability far downstream.
Campbell Scientific, founded in Logan more than 50 years ago, designs and builds the data loggers, sensors and tripods used in the stations. Some of the components were tested in Cache Valley before being carried up the mountains.
“You see these stations all over the world that have Campbell Scientific,” Perry said. “You should have on there, ‘Made in Logan, Utah,’ or something.”
Perry, a National Geographic Society explorer, said he was invited to join an expedition to the top of Mount Everest in 2019. He saw it as the perfect opportunity to install a weather station and study a gap in climate data.
Having worked with Campbell Scientific for nearly two decades, he reached out to the company and collaborated closely with its engineers to make it happen. The equipment needed to withstand extreme cold, high winds and thin air, and Perry said Campbell was the ideal company for the challenge.
“The idea was to try to have something,” Perry said, “a station and sensors that could survive those sorts of extremes.”
Logistics also posed a challenge, he added. Everything above a certain point had to be carried on people’s backs, which severely limited the size and weight of the equipment. Also, a standard weather station might take a day or two to set up, Perry said, with sensors wired in using tiny screwdrivers.
The Campbell team designed the station so it could be assembled quickly, Perry said, even with mittens on.
In February, Perry and his team brought similar weather stations to Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. Like Everest, the stations will now provide real-time data on temperature, wind, snow, and ice conditions in one of the world’s most challenging climates to study.
This information will also benefit climbers and guides who spend extended time in these conditions, Perry said.
“They’re the ones that are actually most at risk from weather because they’re on the mountain so high,” he said. “These networks that we’ve installed in collaboration with Campbell Scientific are also really important in helping us to improve the weather forecasts and to make the mountains safer, in addition to improving our ability to to understand and make better projections of future climate and water resource availability.”
Garrett Wheeler, Campbell Scientific’s education outreach coordinator, said studying the peaks of these mountains, despite what some might think, can inform science close to home.
What the team learns from Everest and Aconcagua, he said, can help guide understanding and discussion about water supply, snowpack, and other environmental factors in Utah. Even though the stations are located far away, the atmosphere is interconnected, and environmental changes in distant areas can ultimately affect conditions locally.
“Working on these projects is exciting,” he said, “because you see this tangible benefit that’s not years away. When we can empower science, we can actually really make a difference as a company.”
The company, one of Logan’s largest manufacturers with over 400 employees, created the first field data recorder, making it possible to measure environmental conditions outside of a lab, he said. Today, its sensors and data loggers are everywhere, from Utah Department of Transportation systems to mountaintops across the state.
“That might seem crazy to other people,” Wheeler said of the Everest and Aconcagua stations, “but we get all sorts of interesting ideas on how to deploy our instruments. And so this sounded really right up our alley. I mean, it’s in our DNA as a company to try and work and partner with researchers and other companies and institutions to try and learn more about our environment.”
