The System Works

So today a simple winter snowstorm came through New Brunswick. It was clear this morning and the sky lowered and dumped about 15 cm of snow on the province. The key I think was that the humidity and temperature were both low and the snow was not sticking or melting. This meant that the cameras had a chance to collect images without snow or ice accumulation.

That meant that the cameras could be used as a reasonably accurate and current indication of both local weather and road conditions. The images at supper time were clear and useful like this one ...

From HWY171208

And this one ...

From HWY171208

The only problems I saw were The Cope Loop Road ...

From HWY171208

and Moncton - Dieppe

From HWY171208

So the system worked pretty much the way it was supposed to. And this is what the rest of the province looked like at suppertime.

What a Difference a Day Makes

From HWY081208

The storm was not as bad as expected, the worst was in the middle of the province near Fredericton. The snow came down wet and then the temperature dropped meaning that the snow froze. That made the roads trecherous.

The light was good this afternoon and the cameras were picking up details you don't normally see like the sea smoke in the harbour at Saint John.

From HWY081208

Or the river in behind the church in Durham Bridge.

From HWY081208

All in all the small amount of snow did make the province look "better". A couple of web cameras are down or obscured by the snow but it was not as bad as last time.

And this is what the rest of the province looked like:

A Quiet Waiting

From HWY051208

It seems that the province is quietly waiting for winter to come. We had our Remembrance Day storm and the snow from that system still lingers in many parts of the province.

From HWY051208

Some more than others.

From HWY051208

All in all the province has had a pretty mild fortnight since the last significant snow and the accumulated snow has pretty much melted away. That said, the province is expected to get a snow storm this weekend even though the extended forecast for this winter is mild and wet. We shall see.

Moncton continues to have its cameras blink off and on and are sticking to the dynamic image. MRDC Salisbury went fuzzy after the last snow storm and never came back to a crisp image. The traffic cameras proved to be less than totally useful in the last snow storm with the image lost to accumulated snow for many of the cameras. If the purpose of these cameras is to inform the travelling public what the current conditions are you would think that the cameras would be located with the following criteria:
1) accessible for maintenance (and the assumption of maintenance)
2) unobstructed view of the roadway
3) field of view such that an extended view of the roadway from near to far is observed.
4) orientation so that the rising or setting sun does not obscure the image
5) reasonably rapid change in image to reflect current conditions.

And yet many of the cameras seem to violate these simple ideals.

This is what the province looked like today:

The First Snow of the Season

There have been minor snow squalls around northern NB in the past little while but nothing that stands out and nothing that stayed on the ground.

Until yesterday. It would appear that the ground temperature was finally low enough to allow the snow to accumulate. The heaviest snow was in the south east to north east of the province from Moncton to Glenwood.

From HWY201108

From HWY201108

From HWY201108

Moncton is still fooling around with its cameras and has changed to a Flash image that is near real time. It makes image capture a bit of a hassle but they also had their cameras pointed directly into the snow storm as well.

From HWY201108

All in all I just liked this image ...

From HWY201108

And this is what the rest of the province looked like today ...

A Turn of the Season

The season has turned here in New Brunswick. Autumn was beautiful and mostly dry with some absolutely spectacular foliage. A couple of late wind / rain storms stripped the trees bare in less than a week and all that is left now are some isolated trees holding on for just a bit longer.

Your faithless blogger has been onto other things and only recently taken to knitting up the 'ravelled sleeve of care. I saw that the highway cameras have returned to their 20 min interval images and thought to take a set. I did capture the odd web camera photo over the past few months but really the low readership and my own interests have gone elsewhere.

I would note that Moncton has gone web camera in a big way with new views of Main Street looking both East and West, Centennial Park and the construction of the new stadium. They obviously took their cue from Fredericton's EZone cameras. Moncton has played around a bit and for a long time they had an uninformative view of a corner of the City Hall property. Just like the Fred Ezone cameras though they have a continual up-date that makes the images a bit more dynamic. I do like the almost calendar image that the Centennial Park camera gives.

Really otherwise the web cameras reveal New Brunswick to be a quiet place with little regular traffic. The CBC Saint John Harbour camera will catch the odd cruise ship.

And this is what the web cameras in New Brunswick revealed today ...

Green and Blue with no Tourists

From the stats this blog is not being read by anyone. Naturally since it is only updated monthly now. I will keep it alive at this minimal level for a while. The province as seen through the web cameras is mostly green and buggy. What is interesting is the low numbers of vehicles on the highways.

It would appear that the cost of fuel has had a strong effect on the people travelling within and through the province. The last few days there have been few (less than 5) times that I have seen a mobile home or trailer on the highway. This will not be good for the provinces tourism industry.

The Fred E-zone cameras caught the changing of the guard in from of City Hall today ...

And yesterday the Meductic camera died and faded to grey ...

But other than that it has been pretty much routine in the web cameras of NB. We shall see what this month brings.

And this is what the province looked like today:

The Green Planet Wakes Up

The defining colour of New Brunswick has gone from Winter white to Spring Brown to Freshet Blue and now Spring Green. The webcamera's have recorded the changes and are now mostly covered in bush green and sky blue with the occasional rain grey and cloud white.





I liked these images from this afternoon ...




And this one from this morning on the Aroostook



And this is what the province looked like this month.

A Lot Can Happen in a Month

The flood of 2008 has come and gone. It was a "bad" flood and many people suffered and continue to suffer the aftereffects of the flood. The Fred E-zone City Hall camera stayed on throughout the flood but did not capture much of the real impact. The crest of the flood brought the river up to the back of City Hall on the second of May.

While the crest took another day to reach the river at the Highway crossing at Coytown-Sheffield. You can see that the river almost covers the lower level of the bridge supports but that is as high as it got in the web cameras.

And if you can believe it there was snow in the south east part of the province at least enough to cover the ground for the last time of the year. I guess in terms of weather that winter is officially over.

After the flood crested the river stayed high for a while but the City drained fairly quickly and people started the recovery process. The Fred E-zone camera came back on the 7th of May with a synthesis of the new Officers Square camera view and the Lighthouse camera into what they call the Library/River camera. I like what I see as it has a good view of the river front drive, the river itself and the city bridge.

And the image retains its colour setting later into the evening allowing for some very nice cityscapes as the sun sets to the left of the image (so I guess the camera is pretty much looking North). This image was about 9pm on May 13th.

In the mean time the rest of the province moved along and the images of the highway cameras steadily got greener and greener as the spring progressed. At some point the cameras switched over to their summer schedule and only capture a new image every hour instead of every twenty minutes like they did in the winter. I guess that only makes sense as the safety issue is not as extreme. The exception would appear to be the MRDC cameras that pretty much provide live still images.

Today the Copp Loop Road web camera captured an image that I like very much. It has a good sky defined by nice cumulus clouds and the camera is steady. I guess I just like the composition and subject of the image.

And this is what the province looked like today at 3 - 4 pm ...

A Flood Creeps Up on New Brunswick

The rain that we had in north western New Brunswick and the upper reaches of the Saint John River came at a crucial point. It cleared out all the snow in the Mont Farlagne area.But some snow remains in the shadow areas in the woods near Glenwood.

What is different now is that the soil temperature and snow temperature are close to the melting point and when 100 mm of warm rain fell on it last night there was a significant increase in the flow of meltwater coming down the river.

We no longer have a good web camera view of the river but the river is now coming to the cameras. The City Hall Fred E-zone camera this evening shows that the parking lot behind city hall has flooded.



The highway bridge does not appear to have changed much even with the depth increase as shown in the MRDC Coytown-Sheffield camera.
I see that someone in MRDC decided that the change in the Longs Creek camera was a roaring success and turned the Salisbury camera around away from the rising sun with a more south west view that includes the whole highway and an overpass with a full farm in the background this might now be a fun camera to keep an eye on.

And this is what the province looked like this evening. The highway cameras are all showing an unlovely but pretty much dry, brown view. We can look forward to green after the wave of blue.

Flooding Hits Fredericton and Camera Changes

The latest news on the Saint John River near Fredericton:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2008/04/23/nb-flood.html


This morning the St. John River reached flood levels at Fredericton and Maugerville with the river coming over the banks in Maugerville and covering the main road in low spots through the small farming community. The news love this story and we will see "on the spot" reporters interviewing the hardy farmer folk that will stoically face the flood. In fact, the number of working farms in Maugerville and Sheffield could be counted on the fingers of two hands with fingers left over. The real back story to this are the people who were allowed to build on the river banks in a flood plain. The first thing that they did was cut down all the maple trees had held the riverbank together. The older homes and farming homes are back from the river, built higher and don't have finished basements. We will see how this plays out.

Anyway, the only web camera with a clear view of the river gave this image this morning.

And then this notice went up.

So now we are blind except for the incidental views in the background of the City Hall Fred E-zone image and from the MRDC Sheffield-Coytown Bridge camera. Speaking of the MRDC I see someone realised that their web cameras were useless for an hour each day because they burned out facing the sunrise. Somebody turned the Longs Creek camera around so it now faces west and only sees one lane of the highway and the tops of vehicles on the overpass. But this was the image this morning and as you can see at least the image exists now.

Finally we need to say "Hi!" to the good people of Beaver Harbour (who, it must be assumed are also the people who host the web camera) as the camera caught them fertilizing their lawn last night. It is good to see ya folks.

They Have Bigger Concerns than the Flood in Fredericton

A couple of days ago the St. John River was high but not alarming in Fredericton but the old dynamic has started. It seems that they have opened the floodgates at Mactaquac so that the potato farmers up river won't get wet. This has resulted in the river rising down river. Look at the up river "knees" on the piers left from the old Carlton Street Bridge from two days ago ...

And now look at them, they are pretty much immersed. But then I guess the flood is the least of Fredericton's concerns now that they have been infected with ....

GIANT MAN-EATING SPIDERS!!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

LINK to the latest CBC News on flooding

Smoke gets in My Eyes

Well of course there would be news on flooding in the upper Saint John River after I posted yesterday. I stand by what I said. Unless it rains or the ice dams the upper river we have perfect conditions for getting rid of all this snow.

LINK to CBC Article on St. John River flooding

And as a perfect counterpoint to my post yesterday the Fred E-zone camera on the river has gone down. The only time of the year that the camera shows anything more interesting than people not picking up after their dogs and the camera turns off. Go figure. At least the parking lot camera in Officers Square is still up but gives a much less informative view of the river.

I also noticed last night that MRDC camera caught images that prove that the good citizens of Coytown - Gagetown like to burn their grass.

Finally, it would appear that the person in charge of the webcamera in Beaver Harbour is trying to decide on a new view for the camera. All winter it was a standard panorama view like this:

If you look closely all the following views are either parts or extensions of this view. For a while it moved to the extreme left and focused on a side road (where once again we see New Brunswickers like to burn their dead grass). Then our intrepid camera operator decided to explore a number of options with it appearing that the decision was finally made to focus on a small section of the panorama that highlighted the harbour itself.

I would note that this last change seems to suggest a change in the location of the camera not just the focus of the frame. Interesting choices.

I have pretty much given up on the Forestry Center camera in Fredericton. The camera covering has become so stained and discoloured that the view is always ugly and we can all live without ugly.

Spring in New Brunswick And the River Stays in Bed

Spring has arrived in New Brunswick and is creeping further up the province. Everyone is well aware that there are two things that will happen over the next month. The snow will melt and the water will flow. What is crucial in this process is the rate of both. The spring melt got as far north as Meductic on Tuesday as this time lapse sequence of the highway webcamera shows if you look at the snowbank in front of the camera.

Now, once the snow melts the water has to drain out somewhere and there are three majour, independent drainage rivers in New Brunswick: the Saint John River, the Miramichi and the Saint Croix. The available webcameras only give us a view of the Saint John River near Fredericton. There are three views: the Fred E-zone cameras show the river and in fact the Officers Square view has been changed from the melting ice rink to across the parking lot to the river (it would have been nice if they had have scraped a bit more filth off the lens but it is a more interesting image). In addition, the standard riverfront camera has been giving a reliable view of the river.

The final webcamera view of the river comes from one of the MRDC cameras and yes, they still face due east so are useless until the sun is high in the sky and yes they still fog up in damp weather but the camera at the Coytown-Sheffield highway bridge does give an incidental view of the river.So the Saint John River is high but still in its banks for one reason. No rain. For the most part the warm weather has been coupled to cool/cold nights which allows the meltwater to drain and the lack of rain has meant that we are only dealing with melt water.

But the spring is not over yet and when it comes to the Saint John River the web cameras tell the story. The lowest level of the river on camera are the ones above (taken today 17 April). As you go up the river valley you can see the images from the MRDC and Brun-Way webcameras just what we are facing.

At Longs Creek the exposed snow is gone and while the ditches still have water in them the meltwater has pretty much drained away.

Meductic we saw above but this is the view today and we can see that there is significantly more snow to deal with as we head up the river.

At the Aristook River the snow has pretty much melted away but it is clear that the fields and forests still have a burden of snow to leave yet. And at the same is true at Quisbis Hill and if anything it would appear that the forests have a significant harvest of snow still to be released.But at Mont Farlagne the snow lies heavy on the ground and there lies the tale. A couple days of warm rain on the upper reaches of the Saint John River and everybody will need to head for high ground.

So with a note of caution we enjoy the Sun that we have now. Indeed, the Fredericton City Hall camera caught a glimpse of the first Sun worshipers of the year if you look at the album cover of the view of the province below.

HWY170408at115pm

As a tiny postscript to this posting I would note that there is a very incidental view of the Nashwaak River through the trees behind the church at Durham Bridge but you have to want to see it.