Brisbane Storm Chasers Kickestarter Appeal

August 12, 2014

Brisbane Storm Chasers is a free and not for profit network of webcams setup throughout Australia for the purpose of monitoring local weather and storms.

Ben Quinn – Owner, Network Manager

The Brisbane Storm Chasers, hosting a network of over 50 high quality cameras, is your virtual window to weather. This is a very worthwhile and ambitious long term effort to provide a webcam network for storm chasers, amateur meteorologists and weather lovers. I’ve been a follower of this webcamera network since February 2011 when I posted a story about the Brisbane network to this blog. I urge anyone who is able to contribute to to this effort to fund their camera network to take the time to visit their Kickstarter fund raising site and view the details.

In the words of Ben Quinn the owner and network manager, “A large and vibrant community of amateur weather watchers and storm chasers exists in Australia, these cameras give them a birds eye view of ‘someone else’s weather’ at the click of a button.

Most cameras face S or SW to capture storms moving towards the camera and for the best view of those in the distance. By a very large margin, the highest ‘spikes’ in the traffic to the Network are on days when severe storms are threatening large population centres like Brisbane.

In that respect, cameras positioned around the city in key storm breeding grounds allow people to see storms hours in advance and even gauge their strength visually through the images, in addition to using the BoM radar images and warnings. The potential community safety benefits here are almost limitless, as long as people are aware of the network and utilise it.”

And further, “When I first started the Network the idea of a ‘webcam’ was some tiny little image embedded on a webpage – half the time grainy or slightly blurry and just not overly pleasant to look at. I could have re-produced those images and taken the easy way out by buying an off the shelf webcam solution… but I didn’t. I developed a custom camera system that would produce exceptional quality imagery and really bring a view/scene to life, make it nice to look at, defy peoples perception of what an internet webcam was like.

This is without a doubt one of the reasons the Network has flourished over the years. Not only does the high quality imagery attract viewers but it also attracts hosts – people want to show off their view.”

This is a very worthwhile effort, and I urge viewers of ‘The Sunrise Project’ to take the time to visit the KickStarter fundraising page for further details on how to participate.