UKC

"Exciting news for Lake District winter climbers: a brand new system to transmit live winter conditions has just been installed on Great End, one of the Lake District’s most reliable and well known winter crags."

See: https://www.thebmc.co.uk/live-lake-district-winter-conditions-monitoring

In reply to Stephen Reid - Needle Sports:

I should add that this looks incredibly useful, telling you the air temperature and the temperature of the turf at depths of 5cm, 15cm and 30cm. On the downside, only the air is sub-zero at the moment!

This is the link that you really need: https://www.thebmc.co.uk/great-end-winter-conditions

In reply to Stephen Reid - Needle Sports:

Turf was very frozen on Great Gable a few hours back. I wonder how much higher that is and if prevailing winds don't affect the turf where the sensor is so much?

In reply to TobyA:

Gauge is at 750m. That photo I took of you at the Pinnacle belay with everything rimed up is about 850m. I'll email you a copy tonight.

In reply to TobyA:

Maybe not that helpful then! Actually 5cm is quite a deep placement in turf so the top 2cm may well be frozen especially if you are higher up.

In reply to Stephen Reid - Needle Sports:

Other than fuelling Internet rants, I think this will be of limited use. Small blobs of turf freeze much more quickly than large masses. To place sensors at those depths requires a small lawn sized patch.

I look forward to future turf tantrums, now backed with "data"

In reply to 3leggeddog:

..and on the flip side, small blobs of snow insulated turf might not freeze at all despite exposed chucks being solid, as I discovered on Glyder Fach this last week.

In reply to 3leggeddog:

I am not sure I agree that it will only be of limited use. For sure it won't tell us whether turf is frozen on a particular route but the 7 or 14 day profiles are great for showing trends and air temp alone at 750m is worth knowing. I think that its great that we are having some comparison of real conditions (from climbers on the ground) and what the sensor is showing. I am interested whether the location of the sensor is exposed or liable to being buried by snow and thereby insulating the turf. It might take some time to learn how to best use this, but I welcome it.

In reply to TobyA:

No sorry Toby, according to the sensor you're busted as a dry tooler and a cad

More seriously, Gable is 100m higher and has a rep for coming into condition quickly. Great End tends to hold a bit more snow as it's not that steep, which insulates the turf. If the turf at 750m on Great End is at 1C, to me that would indicate Gable is worth a punt. Looks like you made a good call.

This sensor is a useful addition to the forecast and felltop conditions reports for deciding whether to head out. All we need now are ones for Kinder Downfall and Point Five!

In reply to Stephen Reid - Needle Sports:

Does this mean bolts are okay now?

In reply to all:

It's great to see some discussion on this and some interesting points have been raised. It's worth highlighting one of the points we make on the monitoring page again:

"We stress that this is not a definitive system – it will not give a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to whether conditions are good for climbing. Small differences from the effect of weather on different areas of the crag may mean the measurement site shows frozen turf when the turf on the crag (or part of the crag) is not, or vice versa. Likewise, weather can affect similar crags even a small distance away differently. There are many variables which contribute to bringing routes into condition and the data below should simply be used as a guide for climbers to make their own, more informed decisions about likely on-crag conditions."

The monitoring kit is located off to the side of the crag itself, on as similar an aspect as we could manage and still get good signal for the radio transmissions. As a few people have pointed out, it will likely take a bit of time to work out how the temps given by the system are likely to reflect on route conditions - they may be a direct correlation or the system might lag behind a little. It might also change depending on whether for example there has been a dump of snow which is insulating the turf at the monitoring site, but could have been wind scoured elsewhere freezing the turf more quickly.

The points about the sensor depth are well made too and something we've already thought about since the kit went in. The general idea was to show a profile through the turf to show if it's only just freezing or if it's rock solid all the way through, but the probes may or may not be a little too deep. This is all very new and we probably need a bit more time to see how the sensors work in different conditions. So we'll see how things go this season, but there is certainly scope to change the depth of sensors in the future if needed.

So overall, the message is to treat this in the same way you would a weather forecast - it's a pretty good indication of what conditions are doing, but you still need to use your own judgement and experience in interpreting the data. It's not perfect - as with anything like this it has it's foibles, but hopefully it's much more informative than just using a weather forecast and anecdotal evidence from people who got out the day(s) before. Here's to an arctic blast in the near future!

Cheers,

Rob Dyer
Access & Conservation Officer (England)

In reply to Rob Dyer, BMC:

Rob, is there any feedback from the welsh sensor in Cwm Idwal and how the temps it reports relates to frozen turf. There is plenty of talk of it "under reporting" so there may be some correlation?

In reply to galpinos:

There are a few potential explanations for the Clogwyn Du monitoring site in particular - could be one, or more likely a combination at play:

1) Clogwyn Du is a very exposed crag that tends to get hammered by the weather whereas the sensor is by necessity in a slightly more sheltered location near the base of the crag
2) It's possible that the sensor catches the sun a bit earlier than the crag does, hence getting more of a warming effect
3) The sensors also need to be located on flatter terrain (to allow easy access to swap batteries/carry out maintenance etc) than routes on the crag follow - this means that snow is more likely to accumulate and insulate the turf than it might on steeper ground. (The flip side to this is that there are plenty of turfy ledges which can easily hold snow on routes though.)

So there may well be a lag effect when comparing the data with on crag conditions, but even so it shows temperature trends which should be useful when trying to work out likely conditions. Arguably the long term air temps might be the most useful of the four readings as they shouldn't be effected by snow insulating the sensors. We have some concerns with placing probes shallower than 5cm as they could possibly be ejected out of the turf by freeze thaw action, but depending on how it goes this year it's something we might trial in the Lakes for the 2017/18 season. Using the kit in this way hasn't been done before the Idwal project and that is only a few years old now, so it's still very much a learning process for us too.

In reply to Rob Dyer, BMC:

What an absurd waste of money....

In reply to Jim 1003:


Bizarre comment. I can't think of a better way to spend BMC cash than on learning more about winter conditions . Would you rather the money was spent on a new logo?

In reply to BnB:

it's an argubot