Monitoring climate change
At 7:30 am, it is still dark outside, and the winds are howling. Losong Lhamo wears her down jacket and gloves. And carrying a flashlight, she arrives at the meteorological observation site.
The 31-year-old bends down to check the ice in the small evaporator, and record the data shown on the tube. After that, she climbs up the slope to observe the changes in the clouds.
Located in Amdo county, in Nagchu prefecture of the Tibet autonomous region in Southwest China, the meteorological bureau is 4,800 meters above sea level, and is believed to be the highest manned meteorological observation site in the world.
Despite the challenges of low temperatures and thin air, generations of meteorologists have been working at the station for over half a century. Seven people are currently working at the site.
After completing her work, Losong Lhamo rushes back to her office to report the data on sunlight, frozen earth, rainfall, wind speed and direction, earth temperature, evaporation rate, cloud cover and visibility.
“We are required to finish each report within three minutes, and we have to be very accurate with all the data,” she says.
Every day, Losong Lhamo and her colleagues conduct eight observations, including one at 2 am and another at 5 am.
“When we are on the night shift, it is hard for us to fall asleep again after finishing an observation in the cold,” she says.
The temperature in Amdo is around -30 C in winter. So, without gloves, fingers can get stuck on the iron door, and the weather forecasters have to warm up the measuring instruments against their bodies so they can operate normally.
“It’s arduous work, but compared to the older generation, what we are experiencing now is no big deal,” she says.
Chen Jinshui is the founder of the station. Back in the 1960s, Chen arrived at Amdo with two tents and a few meteorological measuring instruments to establish the observation site.
“The villagers could not understand what I was doing. They whispered among themselves that I must be crazy,” says Chen, who is 85.
Later on, a few others joined him, and they had to dig into the frozen soil with shovels and pickaxes to build the observation site.
Chen recalls that in the past yak dung was the only available fuel, and he had to walk for dozens of kilometers to buy it.
Without pressure cookers, it was hard to cook rice due to the low oxygen concentration in the air. Therefore, they only ate halfcooked rice.
Chen, who returned to his hometown after retiring, visited Amdo in 2013. And he was happy to see big changes at the station.
Instead of using dung for heating, the bureau has a coal-fueled heating system. A three-story office building has replaced the shabby mud house. And automated observation facilities and electronic data collecting systems have reduced much of the manual labor.
As for the personnel who followed in Chen’s footsteps, they are just as committed.
Losong Lhamo has been working at the station since 2012 after graduating from a university in the city of Nanjing, Jiangsu province. She was so dedicated to her work that she applied to continue working even when she was pregnant and near her due date.
Tsangla once worked in the meteorological bureau of Sog county, where, at an altitude lower than 4,000 meters, work was less challenging and life more comfortable. But the 29-year-old soon applied to move to the Amdo bureau, knowing there was a lack of staff.
Over the past five decades, the station has collected around one million pieces of meteorological data, creating valuable reference data for the study of climate change on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the prevention of natural disasters and for the construction of the QinghaiTibet Railway.