The Mirror Lake Livestream camera provides a continuous 720p livestream to YouTube for residents, visitors, and others to see a live view of Mirror Lake from the Golden Arrow Lakeside Resort.
Why Livestream Mirror Lake?
The livestream of Mirror Lake offers people the opportunity to stay connected to Mirror Lake and the Village of Lake Placid from anywhere in the world. The more people that are connected to this beautiful waterbody, and lakes in general, the more people will care about its protection. In addition to the livestream we also archive images from the camera every 1-minute and assemble those into daily timelapse videos posted to YouTube. You can watch an entire day pass Mirror Lake by in 1-minute; a Mirror Lake Minute. You can go back and watch the ice go out, IRONMAN overtake the lake, or the fall foliage. Or maybe you want to see what happened on Mirror Lake on the day of an anniversary, birthday, or holiday.
The camera powering the livestream is also playing an important role in our understanding of Mirror Lake. The ice record for Mirror Lake is the longest in New York State and one of the longest in the country. Maintaining this record, of ice in and ice out, is critically important to our understanding of how Mirror Lake is responding to a changing climate. It's also important to a broader understanding of how climate change is impacting lakes across the world. The livestream and archived images give us a more refined detail of ice conditions on the lake. For example, we can now document early season ice formation and break up on the lake, information not preserved in the historical ice record.
The ice record is just the tip of the iceberg for what we can learn from this image record. We are exploring the use of computer vision to quantify the recreational use of the lake. If successful, this would provide unprecedented detail on the use and value of Mirror Lake as a recreational asset to the community. Other potential uses of the imagery include; documenting the timing of leaf-out, fall foliage, and the arrival of migratory birds, as well as an assessment of cloud cover and other atmospheric conditions. The image archive is available to researchers interested in exploring its use, contact us if you would like to learn more.
Mirror Lake Livestream Fun Facts
As of January 2020.
- Livestream running since December 16, 2017.
- 525,600 images archived each year, 1,000,000+ total.
- 85,000+ views on YouTube.
- 850,000+ minutes watched, or 590 days 6 hours 40 minutes.
- 720+ daily timelapse videos uploaded to YouTube.
