Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board weather information

Just discovered that White Mountain Peak now has a real time weather station, remote I assume, at an elevation close to Whitney's. You can access it at their website wmrs.edu.

That's a pretty nice site. It certainly lets one know that it's good and cold on White Mountain right now!

That would be -22F using the old system or -5F using the new method. Either way it is cold.

That's a pretty interesting site, but it took me a little digging to find it. Here are links to the same information.

The site for the White Mountain Research Station is: <a href=http://www.wmrs.edu/> www.wmrs.edu </a>

Summit weather can be found at:
<a href=http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/weather/wmtn.html> www.wrcc.dri.edu/weather/wmtn.html</a>

I'd say it's probably correct. A jet stream map I was looking at earlier indicated very high winds over the area. I checked the White Mtn. weather station at 5:30 a.m. PST and it showed a max wind gust in the last 10 min. of 142.6 MPH.

There's currently a Wind Advisory for the area too with wind gust of up to 65 MPH over the ridges.

The core of the Jet Stream appears to be right over the mtn.

I sure would not want to be up there. I wonder how those two full time staff members like being up there right now? Wow!!!!

Hiiker

Of similar interest, below is a link to view the most recent 2 days of weather observations from the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. As most of you probably know, Mt. Washington has the distinction of holding the record for the highest recorded straight-line (non-tornadic, non-hurricane) wind speed on the planet at, I think, 231 mph. You may want to bookmark this site, because each time you access it, you get the most recent 2 days of (user friendly) data as of the time you access the site. The third column from the left shows sustained and gusting wind speeds. Viewing this site every couple of days is especially interesting during the winter months because that is when most of the high winds occur on top of the mountain. The weather station there frequently records wind speeds exceeding hurricane strength, and I have also seen them exceed 100 mph on several occasions. Even as I write this and paste this link here, the oldest data for the current 2-day period has wind speeds in the 70+ mph range.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/obhistory/KMWN.html

On the very interesting White Mountain site, I happened to notice that the barometric pressure shown there is not corrected to sea level. For example, it currently reads 808 mb, which if it were corrected to sea level, would be an unbelievably low 23.86" of pressure. The lowest ever recorded corrected air pressure in a hurricane/typhoon was 26.something inches. If the White Mountain air pressure really was 23.86", I think things might get sucked off the top of the mountain! :-)

CaT

CaT,
I think you converted the barometric pressure on White Mtn. by multiplying the 808mb X .02953 to get the value of 23.86. I understand that. But aren't you just converting units of measurement as opposed to correcting them to sea level values? As a point of reference Hurricane Floyd, in 1999, was runnning 968-977 mb at its worst when measured at sea level (about 28.64 inches of mercury).

Average atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013 mbar. Pressure decays exponentially with altitude as (approximately):
P(h) = (1013 mbar)*exp[-h/7400 m)
For example, 14,000 feet = 4267 m, so a typical pressure at 14,000' should be:
(1013 mbar)*exp[-4267/7400) = 569 mbar.

That is why it's hard to breathe on top of White Mtn.

The White Mountain summit site lists typical barometric pressures for htis month of around 595 mbar (under "historical weather data." That's in the right range.

The pressure listed as current, 808 mbar, makes no sense to me. If you look at "data table for graphs" under current weather, you see that the pressure was around 595 mbar all morning and then it went haywire. That is not real. In fact, it just jumped back to 585, so they must have fixed the problem.