Keeping record: The Śnieżka weather station

DW (English)

For over 140 years, the Śnieżka weather station in Poland has been gathering data that serves as a basis for forecasts related to agriculture and water management. It’s also a valuable resource for climate change research.

Transcript

00:00Getting to work in winter is difficult.

00:04Piotr Olszewski has to climb the last two kilometers.

00:08The 45-year-old is a meteorologist on the Polish weather station

00:13named after the mountain it tops, Śnieżka.

00:16The Polish-Czech border runs across the 1,603 meter high peak.

00:22The weather station is manned 24-7.

00:26Weather data has been continuously recorded on Śnieżka for 140 years now.

00:34If the equipment were to fail, the record would be interrupted.

00:41That's why constant maintenance is necessary.

00:45I clean the rain gauge, the pyranometer and the all-weather cabinet.

00:52The weather station is among the oldest in the world.

00:55Piotr Olszewski and a co-worker spend 10 days and nights here in a row,

01:00supplying weather data to Warsaw.

01:06We send the information every hour.

01:09Among the data is temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction,

01:13air pressure and also results of our observations,

01:16like cloud cover, visibility, etc.

01:19And then any weather phenomenon that might occur,

01:21like rainbows and mountain specters.

01:25Olszewski has been working on Śnieżka for 15 years.

01:29He also photographs the surroundings and weather conditions here for himself and others.

01:34These images are from January.

01:37With extreme sub-zero temperatures and wind speeds of up to 230 km an hour,

01:43he had to go out to make sure that all the instruments were still working.

01:48There are lots of phenomena and unique moments here that are worth capturing.

01:53I used to use a small camera to take photos for myself and my family.

01:58Now I use a single-lens reflex and post them on Instagram.

02:04The weather station is a much-loved motif,

02:07also due to its unusual architecture and history.

02:11Before the Second World War, this area was a part of Germany.

02:17Station head Piotr Kaczkowski has been working here since 1991.

02:22Old diaries belonging to his German predecessors

02:25contain data recorded during the Second World War.

02:29The most decisive change occurred during the war and at the end of the war,

02:34when Polish authorities took over the meteorological service.

02:38For several years afterwards,

02:40German-speaking staff who had worked here during the war acted as observers.

02:46Nowadays, almost all the weather data is electronically recorded and evaluated.

02:56Climate change is a fact that has been confirmed by a long chain of measurements.

03:02You just need to look at the simplest value, the temperature.

03:07You can trace the average annual temperature back to 1886 in this graph.

03:15It's risen almost 1.5 degrees Celsius on Śnieżka.

03:20That's an awful lot.

03:24Climatologist Michał Marosz at Gdańsk University

03:28analyzes weather data from the whole of Poland.

03:32If you look at the changes of air temperature,

03:35they've already climbed by 0.37 degrees Celsius in 10 years.

03:40We can say that we've observed those changes

03:44and they have de facto even accelerated in the last 32 years.

03:49Even in places that lie far away from urban centers like Śnieżka,

03:53these changes are apparent here.

03:58The Śnieżka data are evaluated together with those from more than 8,000

04:03other weather stations worldwide by the World Meteorological Organization, the WMO.

04:10They help to inform scientific research about climate change

04:14and they also serve as the basis for forecasts relating to agriculture,

04:19irrigation and husbanding water resources.

04:24We can measure and also see these changes.

04:28Like the spruce trees that now grow on the mountaintop.

04:33When I started working here, there weren't any at all.

04:37After a few years, one spruce tree popped up.

04:40Now there are several.

04:44What will Śnieżka look like in 20 or 30 years?

04:48Meteorologist Piotr Olszewski will probably be able to observe that at close hand

04:54and make it visible to a wider public via Instagram.

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