Field note · Cairngorms, Scotland · 57.117°N 3.644°W
On 31 October 2026 I walked into the cloud on Cairn Gorm to reach one of the longest-running mountain weather stations in Britain. From my own ground station in Aberdeen, I have also imaged the same plateau from space.
01 · The station
A physics experiment on a sub-Arctic summit
The Heriot-Watt University Physics Department designed and built the automatic weather station on the summit of Cairn Gorm, at 1,245 m. It has been recording wind speed, wind direction and temperature there since 1977.
The summit has a tundra climate. It averages around 213 frost days a year, which makes it the coldest weather station in the United Kingdom. Rime ice forms on everything, and exposed sensors would not survive for long. The engineering answer was to keep the instruments sealed and let them emerge for only three minutes every half hour.
The summit station on 31 October 2026. The hut is shielded by a wall of granite boulders, and the mast carries the antennas and sensors.
02 · What you are looking at
Built to survive ice and hurricane-force wind
- The black cylinder on the roof platform holds the Heriot-Watt instruments. Its lid rises briefly every half hour to expose them, then closes again before ice can build up.
- The Yagi antennas on the mast are the station’s radio link. Readings are sent by radio down to the valley and then on to Heriot-Watt.
- The mast is shared. The summit also hosts a separate Met Office station, so not every sensor here belongs to the Heriot-Watt system.
- The granite wall breaks the wind around the hut on a summit that has recorded some of the strongest gusts ever measured in Britain.
The black cylinder on the roof platform and the Yagi antennas on the mast.
03 · Measurement and verification
Three wind records, three levels of certainty
Cairn Gorm holds the UK’s highest officially recognised wind gust. The summit’s history is also a neat lesson in how much a measured value depends on its verification.
| 173 mph | 20 March 1986. Recorded at the Cairngorm station and listed as the official UK high-level record. |
| 176 mph | 3 January 1993, 11:48. Reported by Heriot-Watt as the highest wind speed recorded by the station. |
| 194 mph | 19 December 2008. Recorded at Cairn Gorm, but discovered too late to be verified by the Met Office. |
Each number is the same kind of measurement from the same mountain. What separates them is whether the value was checked, by whom, and when. Much of my research is about exactly this: deciding when a measurement is fit for the purpose it is used for.
04 · From my ground station
The same plateau, received in Aberdeen
The summit station sends its data down the mountain by radio. My ground station in Aberdeen does the reverse: it pulls imagery down from orbit. This image came from the Russian weather satellite Meteor-M2-3, received directly by my station as it passed over Scotland.
Satellite
Meteor-M2-3
Instrument
MSU-MR imager
Downlink
LRPT · 137.9 MHz
Date
1 June 2026 · midday pass
Antenna
V-dipole, 53.4 cm elements at 120°
Decoder
SatDump
Natural-colour (MSA) composite of the British Isles and the North Sea, received at my Aberdeen station. Coastlines added by SatDump. Ground resolution is about 1 km per pixel.
Cairn Gorm summit, positioned approximately from the coastline overlay.
05 · Troubleshooting, honestly
The pass that missed the mountain
After the climb I tried to capture a fresh pass. On 3 November 2026 a high pass of Meteor-M2-3 came through cleanly, except for one band. The black strip across Scotland is a stretch where my receiver lost the signal. It covers almost exactly Aberdeen and the Cairngorms, which is where the satellite was closest and the signal strongest. The likely cause is the receiver overloading at peak signal. Lower gain should fix it on the next attempt.
Meteor-M2-3, 3 November 2026. The black band is lost data at the top of the pass.
Sources
- Cairngorm Automatic Weather Station, details. Heriot-Watt University Physics Department.
- CG AWS shared description. Geograph.
- Cairn Gorm. Wikipedia, citing the Met Office.
- Cairngorm Automatic Weather Station: 40+ Years at the Top. Royal Meteorological Society.
Photographs and satellite imagery © Shobha Mourya Dumpati, Miti Field Laboratories. The weather station is operated by Heriot-Watt University; this page is an independent field note and is not affiliated with the University.
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