Weather Cam Tutorial

Weather Cam Tutorial

TUTORIAL ON USING WEATHER CAMERAS OPTION ON STAR VALLEY WEATHER WEB SITE

One of the important features of Starvalleyweather.com is the Weather Camera link on the site.  Along with providing some great views of Wyoming and surrounding areas, the cams provide a view of the current weather conditions. This becomes particularly important during the winter weather and associated hazardous driving season.  The cam site teams with the great highway reporting of the Wyoming Department of Transportation,  enabling travelers to monitor ongoing winter weather and road conditions.

The Weather Cameras  is a link to the site http://www.camviewing.com/mosaic/ that was developed by John Hales in 2008.   Quality control of the site is a high priority.  Keeping only those cams on the site  that are active is important.  Cams are usually reliable, however  when one is not available it is dropped from the web site until it comes back online.

At any given time there could be as many as 140 web cams displayed.  The criteria used to determine the display of a camera are:

1. Quality of the image.

2. Frequency of updates. (ideally every minute)

3. Proximity to Star Valley WY

4. View of the sky.

5. Reliability

Here are the cams available  at this time.  Cams will be added or removed dependent on their availability.

Cams available in Star Valley area
Cams available in Wyoming area
Cams available in the CONUS

In addition to the Mosaic of all the cams, there are other valuable features on the site.

1. Left click on the image will provide a  larger current image

2.The cursor placed  at the top of each cam on the mosaic will open up the control menu for that particular cam.

a. Left click on the minutes option(30 60 120 180 300) will build a loop of that length in time.

b. Left click on the info (i) button and it will bring up a google map centered on the webcam location. Additionally it will display the latest  nearby weather observation and identifying the location of the observation.

c. There is also a radar option which when turned on will display the current composite reflectivity product from the NWS 

d. The satellite option will display the current infrared imagery.

3. Clicking on the + will open up a looping option.  At least 3 days are available in the archive for all cams.     Selecting the date/time and looping length in minutes will rebuild a loop.  There are two options when building a loop:

a. The Load Loop option will rebuild a requested  time period  and  display it.

b. A much more powerful option is the Create Video.  This will build the requested time period and then display the Download mp4 Video which will then produce a url link  that can be copied/sent or saved as a video file. While all cams have at least the most recent 3 days archived, additional days can be added to a particular cam upon request.