Chinese making significant advances on Mt Everest 9/2/2004

24 volunteers are headed to Chinese base camp to help clean up the mountain. They will work for about 15 days. From professional mountaineers to citizens of China they will help clean up the lower mountain.

Within the next year China will build the world's highest unmanned automatic weather station on the North side of Mt. Everest to acquire "error-free climatic data", said Wang Jianshe, from the Tibet Weather Bureau in Lhasa. The station will sit at an altitude of 5,300 meters and will collect data on temperature, humidity, air pressure, rainfall, wind speed and ultraviolet radiation. This could represent an important improvement for climbers on Everest as the mountain is currently monitored from a station 90 km away. This is especially true given Everest's unpredictable and often severe weather. The Everest station will be part of an automatic weather-monitoring network spread across Tibet with a cost of 27.35 yuan ($3.3 million) that will help provide long-term and more accurate weather predictions for the region. Source: Xinhua news agency.

Today some teams receive and pay for custom weather forecasts which cost several thousand dollars to product and have proved excellent over the last few years. Other's rely on regional type forecasts which have been very inaccurate at times. Other choose to go it alone...

While some might degrade the Chinese efforts, the truth is, in 2003 the Chinese produced produced REAL LIVE broadcast quality footage on China Central Television (CCTV) along with wireless communication including messaging and multimedia messaging services last year on Everest. This was not a simple image or mov file loaded from a Sony camera but REAL broadcast TV from the Summit of Mt Everest. This was the second time the Chinese transmitted broadcast quality TV from the Summit of Everest. Also, there also is NO question to as if this occurred... Just imagine if a western nation would have done so. We need to give credit to where credit is deserved.

Last year the first Chinese summits of 2003 were broadcast live on China Central Television (CCTV), and then they teamed up with China Mobile Communications Corporation and Motorola Inc. to introduce short messaging and multimedia messaging services at Mount Everest, where some twenty international teams had gathered to commemorate the first human conquest of the world’s highest mountain half a century ago. China Mobile, the largest mobile operator in China, had set up a mobile telephone system at the Base Station to provide the wireless signal. Motorola, the largest mobile handset manufacturer in China, contributed 388C multimedia messaging enabled phones, while SOHU provided the value-added content services for live text-based short messages services (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) broadcasting throughout the expedition and online reporting on the SOHU website (www.sohu.com) and everestnews.com.

Charles Zhang, an experienced mountain climber, joined the 2003 China SOHU Team as assistant captain until a height of 6,666 meters. The team sent around 300 MMS throughout the journey to report on the expedition’s progress. The highest point from which MMS was sent was at 8,300 meters. The 2003 China SOHU team reached the 8,848 meters high summit on May 21 and marked the momentous occasion by sending an SMS text message and planting the team flag.

China is changing, things are happening...

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