Sunday 13 April: It is Warmer and the River is Rising

I had to make the trip to Fredericton and had an opportunity to use the NB Highway system. The MRDC highway between Moncton and Fredericton is polluted with white tailed deer like this guy.
Instead of staying with the MRDC highway I pulled off at the Coytown-Sheffield Highway Bridge (where the MRDC webcamera is located) and continued up along the Saint John River through Sheffield and Maugerville to get to Fredericton. About McGowen's Corner I crossed paths with this aloof eagle on a snag near the highway and the river.
As the picture shows the river was still frozen over but that changed in the two days that I was in Fredericton. It is warmer now and the snow is rapidly receding. This is the Fred e-zone Webcamera view of the river on April 5 ...

And April 7 ...

And today April 13 ...

So the River has opened up and there are flood warnings out. A week of warm rain and everyone will be swimming. In terms of the web cameras the Beaver Harbour image has been frozen on an afternoon image since the 7th of April. The MRDC cameras are useless for the 30 minutes to an hour as the morning sun comes over the horizon and the last rain storm took them all out again but they came back in a day. In Fredericton the Officers Square camera has been a mess for a month but there is nothing to look at. All in all the colours are grey, brown and white and probably will be for a while. And this is how the province looked today:

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March Was the Cruelest Month

What follows below is a listing of the Picasa albums from the month of March. Click on the image to view the album.

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A Slow Process

Well, it looks like the season is changing but slowly. The snow is melting and the ground is thawing and the brown season is slowly being revealed. At least someone in Beaver Harbour cave the camera a kick and reset the field of view to where it was.

The Days of Mud and Hoses 02.04.08

The melting is upon us. We had warm rain yesterday and it fogged up the MRDC cameras like no body's business. The snow banks are in full retreat and at sometime the freshet rush of water will lift the ice on the river and we will have the spring break-up. But for now warm days and cold nights will moderate things a bit. We may have some cold, we may have some snow but I feel the weather has finally turned. If I don't miss my guess there appears to be a bug on the Copps Loop Road camera and the heavy winds we had today reduced the camera sharpness considerably.

I do not however get what happened to the Fred E-zone River camera. It used to have a field of view that included a long stretch of road, a bridge approach and the bridge. This is the image on 30.03.08, useful for traffic monitoring and the local environment.And this is it now ...

Now it has just a tiny corner of the street and a very good view of the river. I doubt that it was deliberate but it will make a good view of the river when it rises. Speaking of the Fred E-zone cameras it would appear that they are serious about doing some work on the new fire hall. If you check out the flags in the Fredericton images you get an idea how hard the wind was blowing today.

The Beaver Harbour camera is now frozen on an old image and is not updating so I guess it is officially unloved. For a summary of how the province looked this afternoon on a warm and windy day look below.

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.

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.

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: