Winterhighland’s Webcam and AWS system at the Scottish Ski Club Hut has been down since late on Monday (5th Jan) due to a communications failure. The exact nature of the problem can not be determiend remotely and a site visit is planned for Thursday 8th Jan.

Providing the issue is not a hardware issue with the router or network equipment it should be possible to restore the webcam and aws feed at some point on Thursday.

In the meantime here’s the final images from Monday afternoon which captured the pefect if chilly weather very nicely:

October has marked it’s arrival with the first Snows of the upcoming winter, as a Northerly Plunge sends temperatures diving. Thursday saw the first reasonable covering of snow on the higher tops of the Cairngorms, and there’s also a smattering on the tops in the West.

It all add’s to the excitement and anticipation at the season ahead, but don’t get too carried away just yet - winter proper is officially 11 weeks away yet, that said it’s another sign of the seasons unstoppable march back to winter.

The past two seasons started the last weekend of November (2006/07) and first weekend of December (2007/08) on CairnGorm Mountain with lasting snow, though cover became more limited in the run up and around Christmas both years.

You can now watch how things are shaping up this autumn with our mid-mountain webcams and live weather real-time weather station on CairnGorm Mountain which are now back online following completion of the reinstatement works to flood damage on the hill road (which necessitated the switch off of the power supply for safety). Our cams and AWS are situated in the Scottish Ski Club Hut at 2500ft near the foot of the White Lady.

CairnGorm Mountain has also installed an automatic weather station and two new webcams for the new season, these can be viewed at www.cairngormmountain.com/web-cam and the AWS is located just under 1000ft above the SSC one at the Tunnel Mouth.

The First Snow at the Mid-Station:

See also Pix from the Slopes for a couple of photos from up top on Thursday 2nd October.

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.