This is very dry grassland country here. The elevation, 5400 feet is pretty high, meaning there are few trees, as well. We're along Highway 287 here, not a long way northwest of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The four camera tower, on the east side of the road, is 5 miles south of the wide spot on the road known as Norris. This camera is the boring one, looking down at the road, as though it is trying to find that quarter it dropped earlier.
One of 73 highway cameras, this is part of Montana's Road Weather Information System (RWIS) which provides not only visual assessments of highways and travel conditions, but meteorological information. RWIS cameras are mounted on a tall steel truss tower adjacent to the roadway along with sensors that measure Air Temperature, Road Air Temperature, Dew Point, Relative Humidity, Wind Speed and Direction, Wind Gusts, Precipitation Intensity, Precipitation Rate, and Precipitation Accumulation. All this data is telemetered to a central location and appears on the appropriate web page in real time.
From the main
RWIS page one may select the image or the data page for each of the 73 cameras. Seven of the RWIS sites are data only and one has a camera only, while the rest have both a camera and data sensors. There is also a
MAP Page, which allows one to see a thumbnail image and the weather data from any of the RWIS sites by clicking on its icon on the map.
Push the buttons below for current: