China builds highest weather station on Kunlun Mountains

BEIJING - A Chinese research team announced Monday that it has built an automated weather station at a 5,896-meter altitude in the Kunlun Mountains in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The new station, launched on Sunday, is now the highest in the Kunlun Mountains. It marked the completion of the observation station network in the middle section of the Kunlun mountains on the northern slope of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, known as the "roof of the world."

The team was led by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Meteorological Service. They spent three months braving rough weather and overcoming altitude sickness to complete the construction of the weather station.

According to Lu Riyu, a member of the team at the institute, the plateau is getting warmer and more humid, and southern Xinjiang has also seen an increasing number of extreme weather events in recent years. Clarifying the evolution of water vapor energy related to climate change and revealing the possible mechanisms behind these changes and their possible impacts are key frontier scientific issues.

Lu added the new weather station will provide scientists with valuable meteorological data for the study of weather processes of the high altitudes, climate change, and unique precipitation characteristics of the Kunlun Mountains.