Forecasting weather in Antarctica

UW's automatic weather stations help guide, save lives of those in harsh climate
By ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff
Originally published: January 22, 2001


McMurdo Station, Antarctica -- George Weidner was riding a helicopter in the blue Antarctic sky, skimming above a white layer of ground fog, hunting for a 10-foot tall metal beam with weather sensors and electronic equipment attached. The device, one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's automated Antarctic weather stations that dot the frozen continent, was not easy to find back then -- January 1989, before the days of global positioning satellites. The fog was making his job more difficult.

Weidner, a UW research scientist, recalls that the pilot, looking for a place to land, tried to set the chopper down slowly, but was disoriented by the lack of a horizon.

Suddenly, the chopper caught a skid in the snow, and the aircraft slammed down violently.

"We felt a powerful jerk, then we hit again, and the plexiglass windshield blew out," Weidner recalls. "It jammed the throttle, and the rotors could not turn off. We had to exit under spinning rotors."

No one was seriously injured, but the team was stranded 25 kilometers out from McMurdo Station, completely exposed to the elements. And although they were rescued, the crash was a reminder of the treacherous nature of Antarctic weather -- and of the reasons for the UW weather stations in the first place.

UW involved since 1980

Since 1980, a UW-Madison group has been installing and maintaining more than 60 automatic weather stations in Antarctica. The stations measure air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure. They are powered by heavy-duty batteries that last through the Antarctic winter and are recharged by solar cells in the summer.

And they provide the thousands of people who work at the bottom of the world with information crucial to their survival.

This year [in 2001], UW-Madison atmospheric scientist Jonathan Thom, 29, of Madison is in Antarctica, installing and repairing the weather stations along with Rob Flint, 60, an electrical engineer from California who has worked in Antarctica since 1974.


On a recent Sunday here, Thom and Flint drove a truck loaded with new weather station equipment out to Pegasus Field, an ice runway on the Ross Ice Shelf about an hour's drive from McMurdo. They had to move a weather station 1,500 feet to accommodate turnaround space for aircraft.

Because Thom and Flint's truck couldn't negotiate an ice rise near the runway, they had to haul the heavy equipment by sled to the new site.

The work was backbreaking. Four plywood boards, measuring about 2 feet square, had to be buried in the ice, at the end of long chains that anchor the weather station in place. About three hours after the two started their work, the weather station was up and broadcasting information to polar orbiting satellites.

Their work, officially called the Antarctic Automatic Weather Station Climate Program, is a UW project under the leadership of professor emeritus Charles Stearns. It is funded by a National Science Foundation grant and is based at UW's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

A vital service

The weather stations provide critical information to weather forecasters in Antarctica, where thousands are at the mercy of the harsh climate.


Art Cayette, the meteorology department manager at McMurdo Station, says the stations are a critical piece to the forecasting puzzle. To prove his point, he calls up a satellite image of Antarctica on a computer. It shows a storm brewing near the Ross Sea.

"I can see a low-pressure system, but I don't know anything else about this storm, from the image," he said. "You need surface reports."

In the United States, he says, there is a network of weather observers, but in Antarctica, aside from the widely scattered stations and camps, there is no one. So the surface reports come from stations placed by the University of Wisconsin.

Lt. Col. Daniel Dunbar is the operations officer for U.S. Air National Guard Detachment 13 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He helps coordinate the flights that take people and material to the Antarctic continent for the National Science Foundation, and weather information is critically important to him. Satellite coverage of the continent is not continuous.



Flights from New Zealand to Antarctica are so dependent on up-to-the-minute weather information that there's a slang term -- "to boomerang" -- for flights that leave for McMurdo but are forced to turn back to Christchurch.

Stearns and Weidner have made these decisions easier by figuring out a way to predict dangerous wind conditions at a McMurdo Station airfield many hours in advance, using data from their weather stations.

"We go through periods where we don't have satellite coverage. That's where the automated weather stations come in," says Dunbar. "They're giving us more accurate and timely information."

Stearns' work instrumental

It is Stearns' work that brought this important Antarctic weather responsibility to UW.

By the late 1970s, Stearns had been working in experimental meteorology for more than a quarter-century, with projects as far-flung as Peru, and as close to home as a proposed power plant in Portage, Wis. His expertise caught the attention of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, which asked him to lead the automatic weather station project in Antarctica.

Since 1980, Stearns has made 16 trips here to put weather stations in place. Weidner has made 14 trips since 1982 and Matthew Lazzara, a PhD candidate with the program, has been here four times since 1995. Thom is on his second trip.

The weather stations, scattered widely across the continent, are marvels of ruggedness, simplicity and a 1980 version of high-tech. Powered by lead acid batteries and solar cells, these weather stations transmit data to polar orbiting satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Weidner fabricates the stations in his ninth-floor lab at UW's Space Science and Engineering Center in Madison. He uses vintage computer parts made in the 1970s -- to conform to the original design -- but is in the process of upgrading the stations to use more efficient components.

The stations, he said, cost about $15,000 each. "We made about 60 or 70," he says. " We service about 20 to 22 per year."

After installing a weather station, Stearns says, the next problem is finding it again.

"You look out, it's everywhere white and not a feature to be seen."

Weidner jokes about early efforts to find the stations on servicing missions. The first stations, actually made by Stanford University, were 2-foot square boxes, "painted white" he says.

Iceberg discovered


UW's weather reach goes far beyond the surface weather. Lazzara runs the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center in his ninth-floor lab at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. It was from here last March that the stunning satellite images of huge icebergs calving from the Ross Ice Shelf were released to the world on the center's Web site.

Lazzara first saw the huge iceberg calve from the Ross Ice Shelf from high-resolution satellite images that are constantly fed to his lab.

The amount of weather information stored in Lazzara's lab is astounding. One wall is filled with more than 200 CD-ROMS that show a continuous display of all weather patterns from 45 degrees south latitude and farther south since 1992.

"A lot of researchers have looked at this data," says Lazzara.

Lockheed used his data to build a composite weather model for use in designing a new plane. When his grant money from the National Science Foundation ran out for a few months last summer, he went off-line; the Australian weather service complained.