Locations of official weather cameras in the United States and Canada.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Weather Camera Program, which began 25 years ago in Alaska and has since spread throughout the United States and Canada, is scheduled for an upgrade in 2024.
The latest advance in weather camera technology will compare a current image with a reference clear-day image, enabling pilots and others to estimate visibility conditions.
The improvement began in 2016, when the FAA asked the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop such a system, now known as the Visibility Estimation Through Image Analytics (VEIA) algorithm. The system includes not only current camera images but also older images with human-observed visibility measurements. The comparison enables the crispness of the edges of permanent features (the horizon, roadways, buildings, etc.) in an image to be correlated to a measured visibility….
