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.
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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.