Happy New Year to you! We invite you to our four year anniversary of documenting weather animations in the Great Smokies. When we move into 2016, we’ll cycle out the observations for 2012. Over the past dozen years we’ve documented weather for areas our maps cover. More recently, we’ve offered an online media library of webcam and satellite animations and daily weather summaries for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. They’re offered as animated GIFs for three webcams and a visual GOES satellite for the region.

Four years of webcam animations

In short few hours, we’ll have four complete years of these webcams. If you need a nice sunset or sunrise, feel free to explore the archive.

As we look to the future, we’re excited to investigate the public data that many personal weather stations are feedings services like Weather Underground and Netatmo. We’ll start aggregating weather station data for our hiking areas and offer it here. That’s a goal for 2016!

We are introducing our new map and GPS datapack series for the Great Smoky Mountains. We’ve created an easily printable map for every trail listed in the Great Smoky Mountains Association’s Hiking Trails of the Smokies, the brown book, also known as the “Hikers’ Brown Bible.”

Our maps show forest canopy cover, trail intersection elevations, and mileage between intersections & backcountry campsites, all at 1:50,000 scale. Our GPS data is the most detailed and current data available. We’ve structured the GPX file so you can easily select your hike and save it to your mobile device or GPS unit. Our maps are offered as a printable, 8×10 PDF file with each page centered on the listed hike. Print your maps and save them to your mobile device, but never worry about losing or damaging your map again!

Currently we are offering two regions, Cades Cove and Cosby & Greenbrier.

Trails in the Cades Cove region: Abrams Falls, Ace Gap, Anthony Creek, Appalachian Trail, Beard Cane, Bote Mountain, Cades Cove Nature, Cane Creek, Cooper Road, Crib Gap, Crooked Arm Ridge, Finley Cane, Goldmine, Gregory Bald, Gregory Ridge, Hannah Mountain, Hatcher Mountain, Indian Grave Gap, Lead Cove, Little Bottoms, Rabbit Creek, Rich Mountain, Rich Mountain Loop, Russell Field, Schoolhouse Gap, Scott Mountain, Turkeypen Ridge, West Prong, Wet Bottom.

Trails in the Cosby & Greenbrier regions: Albright Grove, Appalachian Trail, Brushy Mountain, Camel Gap, Cosby Nature, Gabes Mountain, Grapeyard Ridge, Low Gap, Lower Mt Cammerer, Maddron Bald, Mt Cammerer, Old Settlers, Porters Creek, Ramsey Cascades, Snake Den Ridge.

In the spring of 2009, I wrote a couple scripts to automate collecting webcam and visual satellite images of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and creating animations from them. Recently I put the archive of those animations online after a few requests. The archive also records the past 24-hour temperatures, precipitation, and snow depth for the day selected.

Questions like, when’s a good time to see fall colors, can be now be answered with a visual assessment from last year’s observations. Combare the days between October 10 and October 22, 2009, for a good answer. Between those days, the smokies received its first snowfall.

The archive can be found here: http://www.outragegis.com/weather/img/animation

After a few months of intermittent outage, the four webcams that cover the Great Smokies are all working. Now we can compare sky conditions on both sides of the mountain and also observe sunrise and sunset. The webcam animations also work, too!

You can view these webcams on our weather page: outrageGIS.com/weather/grsm