Donations for Meteo Data

Since the beginning of the investigation there is a constant talk about hurricane strength winds. The first document is a special CPSU report from March 27, 1959. Then there are the testimonies. Mihail Dryakhlykh, March 5, 1959: "From January 24 to February 1, 1959, included, I was traveling on business to 41st district... The district is 40 km straight north from village of Vizhay... During the last days of my trip there was strong wind with a snowfall in the forest and the roads were heaped up with snow and needed a thorough cleaning with bulldozers. When I went home, there was still strong wind and the temperature was colder than 30° below zero. I have lived here for 32 years and we have rarely had winds like this." Case files 40-41

Vizhay forester Ivan Pashin, March 7, 1959: "I believe that at this time when we were there was a strong wind and blown off the mountain. Around the time when hikers were killed even in the village of Vizhay was a strong wind and storm, from which the children were falling down. I am a hunter from an early age and I know these places well, and I remember that there were cases of strong winds when people got killed. I myself had to sit up strong winds for 6 days without food in the hollows expecting when the winds would subside." Case file 50

There are a lot of recollections about strong winds out of norm for the place and season. You can read in the article Death in the Alps how fast, deadly and hard to predict or detect a bora or foehn phenomenon can be.

For some reason, the investigation in 1959 did not determine the weather conditions during the tragic events. A professional analysis of the weather conditions was recently published by engineer Vladimir Moshiashvili from the Russian State Hydrometeorological University (RSHU, St. Petersburg), who determined that a bora was occurring during the tragic events. Aleksander Konstantinov analisys also identifying foehn phenomenon and proposes a mechanism for the bora's development. In 2019, at the request of the Sverdlovsk Prosecutor's Office, a weather analysis was conducted by Doctor of Geographical Sciences G.B. Pigoltsina. Her analysis failed to detect bora or foehn. In fact, these weather analyses partially contradict each other.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website provides weather data free of charge, but it is incomplete for the meteo stations we need. We contacted All-Russian Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information - World Data Center and they confirmed that they have weather data for sale. We requested an estimate for the following meteo stations and parameters: Burmantovo, Jaksha, Verhni Sugor, Ust-Unya, Petrun, Ust-Shugor, and Hoseda-Hard for January 30 – February 2, 1959.
1) relative humidity, 2) absolute humidity, 3) air pressure at sea level, 4) undersaturation, 5) barometric tendency - type of curve, 6) magnitude of barometric tendency, 7) horizontal visibility, 8) height of cloud base, 9) total cloud amount, 10) amount of lower cloud, 11) wind direction, 12) wind speed, 13) total precipitation, 14) air pressure at station level, 15) soil surface temperature, 16) weather at the time of observation, 17) air temperature, 18) atmospheric phenomenon, 19) high cloud shape, 20) middle cloud shape, 21) cumulus cloud shape, 22) stratiform stratocumulus clouds, 23) rain, broken clouds, 24) dew point.

Wetterzentrale.de maps of pressure at sea level and geopotential height at the level of 500 hPa in Europe and adjacent territories from January 30 to February 2, 1959 (all data at 00 UTC). Geopotential values are shown in different colors (the legend is on the right, values are in decameters), sea level pressure (in hPa) is shown by isobars (white lines). Bluish colors indicate bad weather (cyclone), green and red warm colors is good weather (anticyclone). The red circle is Dyatlov Pass. You can see frame by frame here.