On the west side of I 15 at Rock Springs Road, this camera tower, though seemingly in the middle of nowhere, is only 10 miles or so north of the city of Butte. Once the copper producing King of the World, Butte still has a huge open pit mine operating on the east side of town and one will pass it if headed south from here. Of the four cameras on this tower, this is the one which checks the road itself, looking straight down at I 15.
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:
