The U.S. Geological Survey now has two cameras showing nearly real-time views of the St. Croix River.
A new one was just installed on March 21 on the Stillwater Lift Bridge. It provides a new image every hour, looking upstream. A time-lapse video compiled from the images shows the river rising and the ice breaking up as this spring’s flooding takes hold. (Time-lapse videos can be viewed using Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser application on smartphone, tablet, desktop and laptop devices. Additional browser support for Safari and Internet Explorer may be added later.)
The images and videos are available on the USGS’s stream gage site, which also provides real-time data about water levels, temperature and flow.
“Deploying cameras at our stream gages is a relatively new development in USGS,” the agency said on Twitter. “We’re still experimenting and learning. Sometimes nice to confirm conditions (ice effects, etc.) rather than guess.”
Created by an act of Congress in 1879, USGS is the sole science agency for the Department of the Interior.
Upper river
The agency has another camera almost 100 miles upstream, near Danbury, Wis. It shows the Highway 77 bridge, which crosses the St. Croix east of Hinckley, Minn. The site is just below the mouth of the Lower Tamarack River.
This video comprised of almost two months of images shows the river going from snow-covered to open water.