30 March 2008

OK, This Time It is For Real

It snowed this morning. Like it has almost every other day since November. But today is different. The Sun is now out over all the province and man does it have a serious bite. This is the weather forecast for the next week ...

And we have not had a warm day forecast for a whole week since the fall. This just might do it. The set of pictures below may in fact be the last one where every picture has snow in it, the Saint John River is frozen over at Fredericton and there are no bugs on the cameras.

At least I hope so.

27 March 2008

And Baby Makes Three ... From MRDC

The last MRDC camera finally started giving a clear daytime image this afternoon. Like all the MRDC cameras it updates continuously and this one gives a decent image of Long's Creek. The view is actually quite nice but gives a poor view of the roadway on the far side of the highway.

26 March 2008

Another Camera Comes Back to Life

Late today I checked in and found that the Salisbury MRDC camera has found it's way back to a clean image. One has to wonder how long this will last but it looks like this might be an interesting camera.
The Moncton-Dieppe camera has come back from being frozen on an image from 7PM also. That means that we have pretty much a complete webcamera set except Shediac Bridge (which has never been online) and Long's Creek (which the other MRDC cameras would suggest will come back soon).

In the past week there have been at least two system wide freezes of the webcameras and the one on Sunday resulted in a comment on the website noting that the system was down. That was odd. The Moncton-Dieppe camera was part of that and just did not come back with the other cameras.

Something is going on in Beaver Harbour as well. This is the rather pleasing and well framed narrative that the Beaver harbour web camera has been showing all winter.

And then this week it changed to this rather awkward and artless point of view.


You sorta gotta wonder what prompted this change. Perhaps some of the people that lived in the previous image were not keen on having the entire internet world peer in their back windows. Oh well at least the image won't get burned by the morning sun any more.

This is what New Brunswick looked like late today:


24 March 2008

And on Easter Sunday a Web Camera Comes Back to Life

The Coytown-Sheffield MRDC Highway webcamera has been a series of elevated hopes and depressing realities. The latest episode revealed that, yes, MRDC did point all it's cameras directly east so that they would be useless both in the early morning and anytime we had easterly winds (read mostly). However, on Easter Sunday the Coytown-Sheffield camera slowly gained focus until the end of the day on Sunday, March 23 the image was looking pretty good.

The slideshow below starts with the new image on the 19th of March when it was finally fixed then the diffuse images during the last storm on the 20th and the slow recovery of the the camera to today the 24th.

23 March 2008

Easter in New Brunswick

Well, I was wrong about winter. We are still in it's fist and it is starting to wear us down. This is what Easter morning looks like in NB.


20 March 2008

MRDC Finally Fixes Its Cameras ... Or Does It?

Late Wednesday night a routine check of the highway cameras revealed that the three MRDC cameras had come online. There is the old familiar heart breaker at Coytown - Sheffield:

It would appear that they have fixed the field of view issue and returned the camera to its original exciting landscape narrative and even in the dark the camera show good focus and view of the road surface. It is interesting to note that the camera seems to be on a minute by minute update similar to the cameras that the CBC has it St John or the Fredericton Fred E-zone cameras. Our hopes soar.


MRDC also brought the two other cameras online. The Longs Creek camera just did not have anything in its image to record while the Salisbury camera did give a dim image and looks like it might be interesting.


But, we have to remember the heartbreak of MRDC history with its highway cameras. Wouldn't you know that the day after they bring the cameras online we get a freezing rain storm and this is what we see:

Coytown - Sheffield

Salisbury

Long's Creek

I don't know why we let MRDC get our hopes up like this. Oh well, I guess we will see over the next few days if we have a simple case where the MRDC geniuses managed to point all their highway cameras into the prevailing wind (and so these cameras will be useless any time the weather is bad) or that all three cameras have moisture inside the cases (and will be useless anytime the humidity is high). Oh well.

13 March 2008

The Sun is Finally Shining in New Brunswick

Man, this winter just won't let go. There is a part of me though that thinks that this may just be the last true winter set of webcam shots from NB. The river in Fredericton is still frozen over and pretty much every camera shows more snow than bare ground and I just bet that a week from now that won't be true.

The MRDC camera at Coytown - Sheffield has mercifully been shut down and Fredericton has taken the skating rink camera down but pretty much everything else is up and running. Most of the cameras have been obscured by frost, snow or ice at some time over the past few weeks but most of them are clear now with some residual smudges. The Fredericton web camera facing the new Fire Hall construction still gives a rather impressionistic view of the world. Now we wait for spring.

08 March 2008

The Winter Weather Won't Quit in NB

It has not been good weather in NB for the last little while. We have gotten used to March being at least a transition month if not a spring month in recent years. This year it has been a storm every 4/5 days. Recently it has been wet snow or freezing rain. Take today's forecast for example:

This weather has caused nothing but trouble for the traffic web cameras. The new MRDC Coytown camera continues to be huge disappointment from it's hopeful beginnings. The last storm blew from the north-east and a large number of cameras were obscured by ice / snow. They mostly all recovered but with residues on the camera lenses but some cameras went down and only recently came back. One of my favorite cameras is the one in Welsford and it came back in time to catch the train warning signs today but not the train.

Mont Farlagne is now getting the worst of the storm in snow with the web camera in the middle of the afternoon showing clear roads and low snow banks

Just now however the view is dramatically changing.

It would appear that the weather is bringing snow above the Fredericton - Miramichi line and freezing rain hail below it. Tomorrow promises to look dramatically different. Winter in NB you just gotta love it.