Mount Washington Summit
Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question

Accurate weather research depends on consistent data gathering. That means that at various places in the world, someone has to go out and measure the wind and precipitation and other information every hour, every day. And in some places, that can be difficult.

Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. On a nice day this past summer on the observation deck of the Mount Washington Observatory, I spoke to weather observer Tom Zicarelli about some of the obstacles faced by the stalwart weather observer at this particular weather station.

"It gets to be a challenge if the winds get up over 90 or 100 mph, especially in the winter because there will be occasionally chunks of ice falling off of the towers or off of the building. So you have to, you have to really watch yourself when you're coming out here."

But the meteorologists here can make no excuses for staying inside. Measurements must take place every hour, round the clock, no holidays, and of course, no time off for bad weather... which presents some challenges.

"Generally the worst weather, the biggest challenge... well there are two challenges. One is to determine whether or not it's actually snowing, because the wind is blowing so hard we can't tell if its coming down or if it's just drifting. So we have to go to the very top of the tower because usually snow doesn't drift that high. And the other challenge is retrieving the precipitation can, which is...you have to walk about 150 feet beyond the building and carry that back in, sometimes you actually get lost and can't see the building to come back."

That's no joke. It can be pretty terrifying. But no weather observers have been terminally lost and the weather data flow has continued uninterrupted here since 1932. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major funding from The National Science Foundation.