About the 2008 North Pole Web Cams

R/V Polarstern
Web Cam #2 Looking across the airport parking lot and fjord at the staging area in Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, prior to final transit to the North Pole.

Four new web cams were deployed at the North Pole in April 2008. In some of the earlier photos you will see members of the North Pole deployment team in action.

Web Cam 1 was set up to view the Weather Station. It was moved on April 9, 2008 and no longer viewed the Weather station, but on April 20, 2008 it was readjusted, so that the weather station was easier to see in the photos. You can see the path through the snow made by the deployment team in photos on April 20.

Web Cam 2 is mounted with Web Cam 1, looking in the opposite direction. It ran for a while, but stopped on April 9th due to a cable problem. This problem was fixed on April 20, 2008. The two posts are snow-stakes, with orange and white stripes every 10 cm.

Web Cam 3 is a 360 degree fish eye view showing sky and cloud cover. Each reading by the radiometer triggers Web Cam 3 to take a photograph. Images are taken every 2 hours, allowing visual verification and comparison between sky conditions and radiometer measurements

R/V Polarstern
Web Cam #4 is mounted on the Weather Station whose shadow shows in this image.

Web Cam 4 has a wide-angle, 135 degree lens. It is mounted on the weather station, looking at three buoys. You can see the shadow of the weather station in some of the photos. The buoys are hard to see although they're not that far away, probably about the same distance Camera 1 is from the weather station.  The buoys are (left to right), an Ocean Flux buoy (from Tim Stanton, Naval Postgraduate School), the Woods Hole CTD buoy , and the CRREL ice mass-balance buoy. The horizon appears slanted in the photos because the camera does not sit flat in the mounting box.

View animations of the 2008 web cams: small: 1, 2, 3, 4 and large: 1, 2, 3, 4 and YouTube. Please see General Information about the North Pole Images for more information about the web cams, what you see in the images, and the North Pole environment.

Locations of the web cams are shown below. You can also see the drift track of the 2008 North Pole station.

R/V Polarstern
This plot shows the relative location of the Web Cams and instruments deployed at the North Pole. Up on this plot is toward the deployment camp and the runway. The plot shows what the cameras are looking at (but is not to scale). On camera 4, you can rarely see the CRREL snow pinger. The tower you see about in the middle of the camera 4 photo is Tim Stanton's wind generator, with the Woods' Hole buoy is a little less than an inch to the right of it, and the CRREL pinger is a bit more than an inch to the right of the Woods Hole buoy.

More Information :

Web cam Home and Acknowledgments
Daylight and Darkness at the North Pole

• All images 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002
• Moods of the North Pole 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002
• About the environment                 2003 2002
• About the instruments 2011 2010   2008       2004 2003 2002
• About the web cam(s) 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005   2003 2002
• Weather data 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002


NSF The North Pole Web Cam is part of the North Pole Environmental Observatory, a joint National Science Foundation-sponsored effort by the Polar Science Center, / APL / UW, the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory / NOAA, the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, Oregon State University, and Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. Polar Science Center