The Turn of the Season

It has been a long hard winter, deep snow and cold. There is a sense that we are at the peak now though and we will start to slide towards late winter soon if not now.
The highway cameras are fair weather friends and this winter more than previous they have been useless during storms by getting covered or dropping out. I see Shippagan has picked up a camera and Fredericton has re-tasked a camera. Now we wait.

A Seasonal Tap on the Shoulder

The autumn is waning to late autumn and the foliage while still beautiful is looking a bit faded and thin. And Oh yeah we have had our first snow of the year that collected on the ground this past Friday.


This is the image from today that I liked the most.

From HWY241010

The cameras seem to be operating normally. There are a couple of cameras out ... Beaver Harbour has a frozen image, Moncton Centennial Park would have been lovely this past month but it went and never came back but the biggest loss would have to be the St Andrews camera which gave some beautiful NB images. There are a lot of spider webs with the most spectacular on the Fredericton Officer square but the Fredericton airport gets honorable mention because in the right light your can really see the structure of the web. In any event pretty soon it will be snow everywhere. Until then ... this is what the province looked like this afternoon.

Beauty Before Bleak

Best time of year to be in New Brunswick. The Highway cameras do not do the foliage justice but that is not their function. Salisbury has been out for a while and is just back. Some of the cameras appear to be switching over to a winter refresh cycle with a new image every 20 minutes where it has been hourly over the summer. For all that as I have remarked before the camera are mostly witness to empty highways, little traffic and no wildlife. This is what the province looked like today.

A Hot Province Waiting

It has been a very hot August - September transition and we are just beginning to see the weather break with some rain in the north.

The province has been through a long summer and it is clear that the trees and plants have had enough. The leaves are a tattered, tired bleached green just waiting for the chlorphyll to drain away. The webcamera images themselves are a faded overexposed collection. This is my favorite from today ...

They say that a hurricane is coming. Perhaps that will generate some change and renewal. We can only wait and hope.

From HWY030910

This is what the province looks like today.

Problems on the Copp Loop Road

It would appear that there was an accident on the Copp Loop Road this morning. The highway camera for that road is on a summer schedule for image capture so only one image per hour of the event was recording. It is a shame that the camera does not keep an archive like the other ones.

In other news, Fredericton has activated a new camera on the Westmorland Street Bridge to monitor traffic flow while the second river crossing at Fredericton is closed.

The webcamera monitoring site by Wetmore found the Fredericton airport cameras and they give a dramatic fisheye view of the sky around the airport.




I like these webcamera images from the past few days.

Still Empty Roads but now it is all Green

So, this is what the province looked like on Canada Day 2010.

I have no idea why people are looking at this site because the images are old and the links are cold. If you want a good look at the NBV web cameras you need to go to the Wetmore webpage. This is the link: http://wetmore.ca/cams/ to my eyes the only significant webcameras that are missed are the ones at Crandall University and the Confederation Bridge to PEI

Lotta changes since my last update. Fredericton is constantly fooling with their cameras. There was a lot of action at the Old Train Station throught the worst of the winter and then everything stopped once they replaced the roof.

I was driving between Fredericton and Moncton last week and I saw a couple of work areas that looked like the same towers they use for the road conditions / highway cameras so there may be more cameras from the MRDC highway.

I guess this is my favorite recent image.

A Dark and Forbidding Land

The first real province - wide storm is hitting us now.

From HWY020110

To my eyes the web cameras are holding up nicely as the storm and darkness falls.



I like a few of these images. I see that Fredericton has decided to re-task the camera it had on the firestation construction and now provides a view of the city. I only noticed it late this afternoon and the image is poor but it will be a winner in the summer.

From HWY020110

It is clear that in some locations the roads are getting pretty bad and you see convoys lined up behind snow plows.

From HWY020110

We will see what the morning brings.

An Undiscovered Country

It seems that I have completely missed a number of webcameras in the Saint John Area. There seems to be a recent webpage created that gives much better webcamera overview of the Saint John Area that I have.

http://wetmore.ca/camera/

The site itself has two cameras that have copyrighted images so they are not reproduced here. The images are big and clear and even have an archive that go back 10 days so this is an important new resource for those of us interested in the provinces webcameras.

The site also has links to web cameras that I have missed including the Saint John Harbour Bridge Authority (two cameras with a view of the bridge approaches), the yacht club, highschool web cameras in the Saint John area and a private web camera of someones back yard. Cool, all cool.

MRDC has managed to bring all of its cameras to life even the wonky one at Magnetic Hill but they still suffer from inclement weather and are pointed in unfortunate view angles.

Sometimes Even Robots can See

Saw this from the new Dubee camera this morning. I like how the image is textured due to the light levels and camera settings.

We had a storm blow through last night that was not as bad as expected but pretty much left every camera looking at snow. I guess the season has officially changed, now instead of empty roads between fields and forests the cameras show mostly empty roads between snow covered fields and forests.

First Snow Storm of the Year

The first real snowstorm of the year rolled through without much warming last night. As expected the MRDC cameras got shots of the snowplows.





I really like the tandem snow plow shot from Mill Cove but what is that object behind the lead plow?

In any event for the most part the cameras worked as expected but MRDC lost Salisbury and the Bridge camera and Moncton lost a camera. This is what the province looked like this afternoon.

Speaking of New Web Cameras in New Brunswick

Speaking of new web cameras in New Brunswick there is a camera that I have not listed in the past because whenever I checked it the camera was offline. I just had a look and I see that there is now an active online image from the camera of the ski slope at Crab Mountain. Should be interesting when we get some snow. So Crab Mountain ... Saaaaluute!


Click on image to go to link.

This image reminds me of when I was dating a girl that just moved from British Columbia and all she could talk about was how much she missed skiing in the mountains. On and on it went all summer and then I said that we had a ski hill near Fredericton. I drove her up to Silverwood and the scene was somewhat similar to this view of Crab Mountain. She cried all the way home.

About those MRDC Webcameras ...

If you look at these images from the MRDC webcamera this morning for Longs Creek you may notice some similarities ...

It looks to me like the camera is firing when an object is in the center of the field of view. Not only that look at the image times and intervals
9:04
9:35 (31 minutes)
9:51 (16 minutes)
10:06 (15 minutes)
10:36 (30 minutes)
10:51 (15 minutes)
11:07 (16 minutes)
11:38 (31 minutes)
11:53 (15 minutes)
Not exactly machine like interval times which suggests that the image is event driven.

Now that is an interesting addition to the camera and I do not know if that provides useful information for the person looking for information on driving conditions. It does however make the images more interesting. I am guessing we will see lots of images of snowplows this winter.

As for the new MRDC cameras I gotta say that while new cameras are a good thing twitchy new cameras is a bit aggravating. The Dubee and Magnetic Hill cameras have frozen and the Magnetic Hill camera has already been taken offline.

While I am on the blog I gotta say that the people in Beaver Harbour have once again changed the field of view for their webcamera. It has a better view of the harbour and promises to be interesting if it stays on this line through the winter.

Something to Cheer About

So this blog has been inactive for about a year but there are some hits from people looking for links to webcameras in New Brunswick. I figured I would step in and update the links so that the blog at least retained some utility.

In terms of web cameras in NB there have been some significant changes.

This past summer Fredericton had a webcamera mounted in a city bus that gave some significant real time street action when it was working but it was inconsistent and slow to update and they stopped the camera this past fall.The webcamera at the Forestry center in Fredericton was having problems a while ago and was getting fuzzy with poor colouring and finally it went dark and has not been fixed.While we are talking about Fredericton web cameras I guess we should mention the passing of the Fire Station camera which is natural since the station is completed and I was keeping an eye on the camera to see if I could catch a truck on the way out. It never happened.In terms of new web cameras I see that Crandall University have a web camera set up with a view of their construction site. Click on the image to go to the flash image.
The real news is that actual highway cameras have been renewed and added. The MRDC cameras have been down for a while and they were four excellent quality images so they were missed. The MRDC cameras came back yesterday and three more cameras have been added at Dubee, Mill Cove and Magnetic Hill. The cameras are not as good as before and I am hoping that they will send someone out to fix the field of view on some that do not show the road surface clearly at all. They have set the cameras up so that they are like the Brunway cameras with a 24 hour library of images stored which is nice.

And this is what the province looked like today as viewed by the highway cameras ...

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.