Following a rather damp and misty afternoon slide up top on CairnGorm, the walk from the bottom back up to the Ski Club Hut at 2500ft was undertaken to check up on the webcams and make some modifications.

The changes included renaming the images from the additional third camera to mid.jpeg and setting the existing two cameras to upload short video clips each hour.

The latest images from the three cameras can be found at www.winterhighland.info/testcam

Video Clips can be accessed by clicking the video icon/link at the top of each image and each camera also stores 6 images from the past hour.

It’s a cracker of a day in the Central Highlands, blue sky, still and frosty. Not a true white Christmas but a definite festive tinge from the frost. Hope Santa was good to you, maybe we should ask him for some snow making next year?

Have a great day and don’t over indulge (too much!)

With a cold spell looming and possibly the first meaningful snow fall further down the mountain the walk up to the Ski Club Hut was undertaken to install an Automatic Weather Station and return the Webcam set up to the hut.

At this time the weather station is not permanently installed, the temperatuere/humidity sensors are, but the wind sensor is just temporarily mounted while the basic system is tested out.

Wet and blowy late afternoon, by dusk it was absolutely pouring, streams were raging and there was a full blown torrent running down the path from the hut. On the drive down the Allt Mor looked a bit scary!

Just a brief note to let you know that the Winterhighland webcams in the Ski Club hut on CairnGorm will be down for the next few days as their currently in Inverness. With the forecast looking milder for the weekend again, I’ve taken the opportunity to get the system of the mountain to make some changes and test them out at base.

This will hopefully help contribute to a more stable camera system that will help maximise uptime during winter as well as enabling a longer term archive of images. We hope you’ll like the mod when the system is fully reinstalled in the SSC hut. The system was also rigged temporarily and we need to secure it for winter so the gubbins and leads don’t get in the way!

Our White Lady camera appears to have developed a communication issue on Wednesday afternoon. An automatically scheduled reboot on Thursday afternoon has failed to clear the issue. A trip to reinstall the second balcony camera was planned for the weekend, but this will be brought forward to Friday afternoon. Hopefully we’ll get some interesting weather to watch over the weekend, but it looks awfully like the forecast Northerly is being shunted out into the north sea leaving us in somewhat milder air.

Early this morning Winterhighland made it’s new webcam system which we’re testing on CairnGorm (with the help of the Scottish Ski Club) publicly available. The cameras were installed on Tues 23rd October and I walked to the Ski Club Hut in a T-shirt ! I wonder if there is any truth in the old lore about winters and warm dry Octobers?

CairnGorm Charmer

Today though was not T-shirt weather, walking up the Home Road to the SSC Hut was a serious undertaking against the relentless and strengthening wind, which was howling down Coire Cas with no mercy for those competing in the inaugural CairnGorm Charmer biathlon race. Involving a four mile run from the Daylodge down to Glenmore, a four mile bike ride around the forest before a gruelling four mile run back up to the Daylodge in Coire Cas.

An enormous shout must go out to Paul and Gordon ‘The White Lady’ Duo who were racing to raise money for the ‘Cherished Uplift Fund’ which is collecting money to contribute to the repair of the White Lady Tow and improvements to fences and piste layout to increase the use of this Iconic lift and run. [Edit - they came in an impressive 15th and raised over £400. Very well done indeed.]

Also a big thankyou to Olderalan for the post event hospitality and mouthwatering lamb curry!

Webcams…

Back to the webcams and it should be noted that the camera system is still a work in progress and during the autumn test there will be periods of downtime, while we refine the scripts and hardware configuration. The goal is to have a remote system that can run for a decent period of time unattended and we’re doing it not with expensive network cameras, but with otherwise redundant old P3 computers running linux and USB video class complaint webcams. The hope this will allow us to role out more cameras faster than would be possible utilizing high cost equipment. Losing the occasional £50-80 web camera to the severe operating conditions is somewhat easier to take than losing an £800 one!

This blog will have updates on the cameras filed under ‘webcams’. I hope you find the cameras useful and hopefully we’ll soon be measuring the snow against the balcony deck railing.