As a teenager in rural North Carolina, Baker Perry devoured National Geographic magazines and books about Mount Everest and Antarctica.

When it snowed, he would camp in his family’s yard rather than hunker indoors; during the biggest storms, he’d get in trouble at school for monitoring the weather with a specialized radio during class.

Perry, whose parents had founded a rural health project in the Bolivian Andes, had spent his formative childhood years wandering among massive glaciers and exploring mountains at 13,000 feet. That love of the mountains and weather stuck with him when left the towering peaks of the Andes for the gentle slopes of Appalachia.

Perry, now 50, has spent a combined more than six months of his life at altitudes of 16,000 feet or greater studying glaciers and effects of climate change on high-altitude “water towers” — mountains that store and transport water to lower elevations. 

He’s co-led around two dozen research expeditions around the world establishing high-altitude weather stations across the Andes in South America and the Himalayas in Asia, including near the summit of Mount Everest (elevation 29,032 feet) with the goal of better understanding the effects of a warming climate on high-altitude water sources and their downstream communities. 

Now, Perry is focusing his sight on lower elevation mountains, but a range that still serves as a critical water source.

Perry is Nevada’s new state climatologist, replacing former interim state climatologist Tom Albright, who served in the position for a year. Based out of UNR, Perry will continue research in the fields of weather and climate and their effects on the state and the broader region, which has many gaps in data collection in its more rural areas. 

Weather looks at short-term events such as humidity, wind speed and precipitation, Perry said, while climate looks at the long-term averages of those individual measurements of weather.

“My work really transcends the boundary between weather and climate,” he said. “What you see in the climate record is a composite of all the weather we experience.” 

In Nevada, that means looking at the state’s reliance on the Sierra Nevada for water in the west and the Upper Colorado River Basin for water in the south. 

More than 20 percent of the world’s population relies on water supplied from snow and glacial melt, but increasing global temperatures are resulting in rapidly retreating ice and snow and downstream needs are straining higher elevation water sources.

While his work has primarily looked at high-elevation areas such as the Andes and Himalayas, “there’s a lot of similarities to what we see around here, where snow is so important,” he said.

We knew more about Mars than Everest 

Perry was just 7 or 8 years old the first time he explored a glacier, in an area outside La Paz, Bolivia, that once boasted to be the highest ski area in the world. Perry’s family would hike along the edge of the icy slopes of Chacaltaya Ski Resort, built atop an 18,000-year-old glacier at an elevation similar to that of Mount Everest’s Base Camp.

But high mountain regions are warming faster than the global average, and by 2009, the glacier had completely disappeared.

“That was a pretty eye-opening experience to just kind of watch its demise. It was a bit of a canary in the coal mine of what was coming,” Perry said. “The thing disappeared pretty quickly.”

Perry bounced back and forth between North Carolina and South America during college and while teaching at Appalachian State University, where he taught for 26 years. He found he could combine teaching with his field work in the Andes, and during his trips to the Andes he’d set up simple precipitation gauges. 

His family often traveled with him, and he and his wife, Patience, were able to expose their kids — now in high school and college — to the mountains of South America, similar to when he was a child. 

In 2014, he received funding from the National Science Foundation for a five-year project in the Andes that allowed him to put up sophisticated weather stations, including what was then the highest precipitation monitoring station in the world. 

Four years later, he received a formal invitation to join a National Geographic expedition to Mount Everest, alongside renowned expedition leader and fellow scientist Paul Mayewski and supported by famous alpinist Conrad Anker, to install multiple weather stations, including what was then the world’s highest elevation weather station.

In 2019, Perry traveled halfway around the world and up to an elevation of nearly 28,000 feet to help install the station. Weighing more than 100 pounds, the station — an intricate compilation of metal poles, cables and panels — has measured winds up to 148 miles per hour and temperatures down to minus 117 with windchill. Scientists hope to use the data to assist with reconstructions of past climate history made from studies of ice samples taken from nearby glaciers.

The installation of the weather stations helps fill a sizable void in understanding worldwide climate issues — at the time, there were more than 19,000 weather stations at elevations 9,000 feet and below (just slightly higher than Carson Pass near Kirkwood) but very few at higher elevations, and no stations at elevations above roughly 20,000 feet and Everest’s summit.

“We knew more about the weather on Mars than we did about the top of the world on Earth,” Perry said of the impetus to install the weather station, a two-month-long endeavor. “There’s huge value scientifically — absolutely, it’s been worth it. But there’s huge risks and sacrifices.”

The accomplishments of Perry and the team he worked with were documented by a National Geographic film crew in the documentary Expedition Everest.

Perry has returned to Everest several times since 2019, most recently last spring, to continue installing and maintaining high-altitude weather stations, one of which was destroyed by winds that exceeded 150 mph. A new station is now mounted even closer to the mountain’s summit, at 28,904 feet.

“You’re literally on the edge of the world up there. It’s so high. You almost feel like you can touch the stars — it’s literally on the edge of the atmosphere,” Perry said.

During the last few years, Perry has also traveled back to Peru to help install the highest weather station in the Americas to gather data in real time, including temperature, wind speed and relative humidity. The installation was part of a two-year-long series of scientific studies looking at the entirety of the Amazon River Basin, from its mountain peaks to its lowest elevations. 

A better understanding of higher elevation weather can help predict the future of ice fields that serve as water sources for lower elevation populations, and what water availability could look like for those communities in the future.

Similar to some of the world’s highest elevation areas, the web of observational networks across Nevada leaves something to be desired. While areas such as the Sierra Nevada are well studied, “there’s huge gaps and really big opportunities” in other portions of the state, he said.

Part of that gap stems from a lack of a cohesive plan for monitoring high-elevation climates, he said. In the United States, there is no national entity that oversees them, so it’s up to various groups and universities to monitor and share information. In Nevada, where roughly 85 percent of the state is managed by the federal government, he’s pushing the argument that federal agencies should play a bigger role in helping the state expand their observational networks.

“The snow and the ice found in mountains — not just the Himalaya and the Andes, but also here in our Sierra Nevada — they serve as water towers and sustain communities and ecosystems downstream,” he said.

Climate and weather whiplash

In early September, the wind-driven Davis Fire burned more than 5,800 acres just south of Reno, destroying two commercial buildings, 14 homes and nearly two dozen outbuildings.

While crews were still battling the fire, he left the smoke of Northern Nevada and flew back to North Carolina for a series of research meetings. While there, he watched as his family farm was battered by Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 hurricane with peak winds of 140 mph when it made landfall, killing more than 100 people.

Several years ago, Perry served as co-author on the North Carolina Climate Science Report, an assessment of past climate trends and potential future climate change in the state under increased greenhouse gas concentrations.

The report predicted many of the occurrences he saw under Helene, Perry said. 

“North Carolina has always been at high risk for hurricanes, even in the mountains,” he said. “So, it’s not necessarily a surprise, but when you see the degree of devastation and the impacts that did occur, it’s different.”

Although the Davis Creek Fire and Hurricane Helene were separated by thousands of miles, weather whiplash and more extreme weather events are challenges people can expect to deal with more often under a warming climate, especially with the nation’s infrastructure not designed to withstand these types of more severe storms. The Earth’s temperature has risen steadily since about 1850; since 1982, it has warmed by 0.36 degrees per decade.  

“It felt like this eerie sense that this is the new reality that we’re facing with kind of the new climate we’re entering,” Perry said. “That was a very foreboding reality.”