Ice-covered year-round, Lake Untersee gets new Lufft weather station

Lake Untersee is a special place, with sediments that produce more methane than any other natural aquatic system on the planet, according to the Lufft Blog. And so it is understandably of interest to researchers with the SETI Institute who have recently launched a weather station to monitor conditions around the frozen water body.

The new station is solar-powered and includes a Lufft WS501 that collects information on air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, solar radiation and wind. Scientists with the institute were looking to install a second station there in 2014, but were hampered by extreme weather.

That’s not so surprising, as Lake Untersee is completely covered with ice year-round and sits within the interior of Antarctica’s Gruber Mountains. The second station is planned to go up in November 2015, and will be armed with another Lufft weather sensor to collect data that will be used to judge the accuracy of the other weather sensors sitting nearby.

Top image: Weather station. (Credit: Dale Anderson / SETI)