A picture is worth a thousand words

I’ve had a webcam continuously mounted to the roof of my family’s cottage on Lake Sunapee since 2014, mainly with the purpose of spying on the weather when away from the lake. Our view of Sunapee Harbor is one of the best views on the lake. Unfortunately, from the angle of the webcam, you can’t see Mt Sunapee, which is located directly behind the tall tree on the right.

I wrote a program for a Raspberry Pi micro computer that sits inside the cottage which uploads photos from the camera to a website, which also gets forwarded to other weather websites such as Windy and, formerly, Weather Underground. Windy even generates 24-hour time-lapses.

Additionally, within the last couple years, I wrote another program that tweets the sunset and sunrise webcam photos on the @SunapeeWX Twitter feed. Slowly, I’ve made improvements to the feed, including embedding a temperature forecast API. Soon, I hope to integrate a sunset/sunrise forecast API, SunsetWX, which is also available via the Alpenglow iPhone app.

Keeping a remote webcam online over the years has proved to be a challenge, particularly with intermittent power and internet. This is the second webcam I’ve had on the roof and this spring I’ll probably upgrade and get a newer one. The sensor is starting to fail, thus why it frequently shows blank or pixelated images. The Chinese firmware in this Amcrest camera is also particularly bad. The reviews on newer Reolink cameras look more promising.

I’ve also experimented with personal weather stations on the roof over the years, but those have proven to be finicky as well, so I’ve chosen to focus on the webcam instead. The webcam has been extremely useful for anticipating both aviation and ski conditions. A picture is worth a thousand words!

Windy weather

“All models are wrong, but some are useful,” according to the famous statistician George Box. The same can be said about weather models. Believe it or not, there is more than one forecast model. Most sites and apps in the US use the North American Model (NAM), which many meteorologists and weather observers question its accuracy.

I think the best solution is to have access to more weather models, which is why Windy is my go-to weather website and mobile app. Windy currently supports five weather forecast models, and even allows the users to compare all models on one timeline view for any given location.

I was introduced to Windy by a coworker several years ago, and I’ve been impressed so much that I currently subscribe as a premium customer. It was developed in Javascript by a helicopter pilot to initially help show wind information. The website and app are constantly getting new updates and new layers for the map. I find the rain & thunder, cloud cover, Infra+ satellite, temperature, and wind layers to be most interesting. Personal weather web cams can be submitted to the site, as I’ve done for my Sunapee Harbor Webcam. Highly recommend windy.