The silo and the observatory at the summit of Whiteface provide crucial data to scientists about weather trends as they relate to elevation. (Provided photo — Scott McKim)

WILMINGTON — Whiteface Mountain is known for skiing, hiking and its unparalleled views of the High Peaks. What many people do not know is that it is also home to a state-of-the-art weather research station operated by the University at Albany.

“Whiteface, the field station, is kind of a well-kept secret in a lot of ways,” said Whiteface Mountain Field Station Science Manager Scott McKim. “As someone who lives here, it’s quite a remarkable facility for the relevant and significant science that’s going on in our backyard. Not only is it a sentinel of the larger climate change signal for the east, but we have this very modern, kind of gold-standard Mesonet that we maintain in New York state that, hopefully, more people learn about and access the data.

The Mesonet, a network of weather monitoring sites operated by SUNY, was created in 2014 with a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Its main purpose is to detect severe weather early enough to provide adequate warning and preparation time for New Yorkers. All of the real-time information collected by the stations is available to the public on Mesonet’s website and app.

Its network of 126 stations was completed in 2018. About 40 of these stations are in the North Country, with sites in Tupper Lake, Gabriels and Wilmington. A new station — its first addition in five years — is currently under construction at Uihlein Farm in Lake Placid.

The Whiteface station is unique in that it has two points that collect data: the main field station on the shoulder of the mountain, which is around 2,000 feet; and the silo and observatory at the mountain’s summit, which has an elevation of 4,867 feet.

The summit of Whiteface Mountain is home to sensitive equipment that collects data about the weather and air quality. In winter, snow can accumulate on the equipment, necessitating weekly trips to the summit by trained professionals to service the equipment. (Provided photo — Scott McKim)

“One of the huge things, scientifically, is we can do a lot of environmental sampling at two different elevations,” McKim said. “Elevationally dependent data is huge because we can compare them from those two elevations.”

The station began collecting data more than 50 years ago to monitor air quality and acid rain, which began negatively affecting the Adirondacks in the mid-20th century. Lakes had become acidified, killing aquatic animals and disrupting the food chain. Acid rain also drains nutrients from soil, hindering forest growth.

“We have an over 50-year data record up there that tracks the whole acid rain problem all the way up to the current state, which is a huge success story,” McKim said. “Our air is so clean now that our lakes are no longer acidified.”

The Whiteface station still undertakes acid rain monitoring but has now shifted toward monitoring how wildfires and smoke events affect air quality. The station also measures per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which are known in layman’s terms as “forever chemicals” because they break down very slowly over time. According to the EPA, PFAS chemicals are found in many consumer products and may cause adverse health effects in humans and animals.

The station also measures weather variables such as temperature, moisture and wind. It maintains a summit web camera in partnership with the Wild Center in Tupper Lake and conducts research on climate and weather trends using its decades of historic data. As worldwide concerns about climate change mount, this data is increasingly important, showing us where we’ve made progress and where we need to focus our efforts, according to McKim.

“Generally speaking, talking about air quality, things are much, much cleaner,” he said. “We live in an amazing part of the world where we have amazingly clean air. A lot of that can be traced back directly to kinds of clean air action like putting scrubbers on smokestacks that are based upwind from us — basically the Ohio River Valley in the Midwest.”

Charting weather trends “gets a little interesting,” McKim said.

“Across the board, things seem to be getting wetter. We’ve noticed increasing floods. So, both wintertime precipitation and non-freezing precipitation we’re seeing increases through all months and all seasons,” he said. “With that being said, we do spend a lot more time in the extremes, both temperature and precipitation-wise. What we’re finding is the climate has a propensity to be much drier, much wetter, much colder, much warmer for longer periods of time. We feel that in the North Country.”

McKim pointed to earlier in 2023, when the area was in a D2 drought, before abruptly experiencing flooding in June and a continued wet season since then. He said that the weather right now spends “larger periods of time at each end of the spectrum” rather than more moderate temperature and precipitation levels.

Up at the Whiteface summit, things are getting colder. The same trend has been observed at Mount Mansfield in Vermont and Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the highest peaks in their respective states.

“As a scientific community, we don’t totally understand why,” McKim said. “We have some theories, but I’ll leave it at that for now.”

With its status as a winter sports hub and two-time host of the Olympic Winter Games, Lake Placid’s climate concerns often revolve around reliable snowfall and temperatures chilly enough to keep the snow around. A January 2022 study from the University of Waterloo concluded that, if current climate trends continue worldwide, Lake Placid will be one of four former Olympic locations to have reliable snow by 2050.

By 2080, only one location in the world — Sapporo, Japan — would remain snowy enough. McKim said that, as of now, the Adirondacks “remain a refuge of winter” compared to other locations in the eastern United States.

“When it is wintry here, it’s amazing,” he said. “There’s a huge snow drought, multi-year snow drought now, for New York City and kind of the mid-Atlantic states: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. New England’s holding on to more, but these kind of islands in the sky of mountains, whether it’s the Green Mountains, White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Adirondacks, are kind of these last remaining bastions of winter weather.

“I can’t speak for the other locations, those Olympic venues, but I think there’s a lot of winter to be had still. Climate is something that’s talked about often and it’s a hot-button topic, but the climate system is pretty resilient. We’ll still have winters to rely on here. How quickly things change is anyone’s guess, but it’ll remain here the longest, so to speak, because of our elevation and where we are latitude-wise.”