TacomaWeatherCam.com is a public service of Alpine Computer Service

This web camera is provided by Alpine Computer Service and was first put into service on Dec. 22nd, 2005. It is located in central Tacoma looking SSE toward Mt. Rainier in Washington State.  Later the "Lenticular Cloud Cam" was added.

The camera is a Creative Labs Webcam Live! Ultra, Wide angle, USB with a 5 meter USB extensions, running on a 1.2 GHz PC Server system. The camera is housed in an outdoor enclosure designed to appear like a birdhouse with a face of glass. Anti-fogging is accomplished with a small 12 volt circuit & resistors keeping the glass warm & clear.

The Lenticular cloud cam is made up of parts from an old pair of binoculars, utilizing the front objective lens and the eye piece from the binoculars and a few pipe parts we were able to construct a 10X (power) mini telescope and attach a Creative labs NX webcam, this is all housed inside of a weatherproof box and transmitted to another 1.2 GHz PC Server system.

Webcam software is Willing Webcam Lite ver. 3.5 & Gotcha! ver.1.2.

The weather station is made up of a Davis VantagePro II wired station with the Integrated Sensor Suite mounted 12 feet above ground and the wind sensors mounted 33 feet above ground. The information collected by the ISS is transmitted to the controller console where the data is assimilated, logged and sent to another PC Server that provides report generation and "rapid-fire" data transmission to all the appropriate agencies and organizations that utilize the data to provide better weather and climate predictions.

These Servers provide a constant stream of data to a Primary Domain Controller Server which serves as WWW access and long term archive storage.

Our Product

VIEWABLE AREA

The viewable area of the wide angle camera is illustrated in the lighter areas, the 10X-power "Lenticular Cloud Cam" has only a 5° field of view, but with 10X the magnification

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