Who wants a little more St. John in their life? I know you all do! Well I have great news for you today… There is a new webcam on island, and the view is spectacular!
The island’s newest webcam is located up at Coconuts and Plumeria villa on Gifft Hill. The view shows the hillside down to Great Cruz Bay, out to St. Thomas, the outlying cays, Caribbean Sea and more. Click here to check it out.
The owners of Coconuts and Plumeria, Kevin and Danielle McCarthy, are always trying to enhance their guests’ experience when visiting the island. They provide weather forecasts including Saharan Dust forecasts, marine forecasts, planetary forecasts and more. Click here to check those out.
Kevin even created a skee-ball machine for his guests pre-storm, but sadly, it did not make it through the aftermath. How cool does this look??!
We just added the Coconuts and Plumeria webcam to our webcam page. Please click here to view all of our webcams.
Have a great day everyone!
The sunsets are going to be gorgeous from that cam!
Thanks! Looks to be a great sunset cam (ever since St. John Brewers abandoned theirs) but I’ve always wondered why the clouds always seem to gather in this area between St. John and St. Thomas.
Eduardo: Hi, Kevin here. Yours is a really great question. Do check out the section “VI Weather Basics” at our site, http://www.weather.vi to learn more, but here is the short answer:
The trade winds blow east to west. As that air moves over thousands of miles before the VI, it gets pretty moist due to all the water just beneath it. Then it encounters our hills, and cannot help but rapidly ascend. The atmosphere gets cooler with altitude (when you fly to the VI, the temperature outside your jet can easily be 40 below zero). So as that moist air ascends, it gets colder. Now it happens that the amount of water vapor that air can hold decreases rapidly with temperature. So the water vapor in that cooling ascending air has to condense and change into liquid water. Sometimes that means a brief tropical shower, but most of the time it means that clouds (areas of small water droplets) form. These trail westward of the highest peaks (Mt. Sage on Tortola, and Bordeaux Mountain on St. John). So if you look at satellite images, clouds trail off to the west from mountain peaks, and since St. Thomas is to our west, our clouds scull towards them.
Do check out http://www.weather.vi; there is a lot of cool stuff there.
amazing. thank you!