The FAA weather cameras on Hawaii's ridges and headlands

At 03:09 on 2026-10-31 the Makaha Ridge camera looking northeast had the headland standing black against a grey sea, a thin line of surf at the foot of the cliff, and a lid of cloud over the lot. The frame was stamped 13:09 UTC, which is how the FAA writes the time into every picture it serves. That camera sits above Kauai's west coast and it belongs to the FAA, which is not where most people go looking for a view.

It is one of 134 live FAA weather cameras in Hawaii, counted on 2026-10-31, spread across 35 sites and every main island. I had not paid them much attention until three of the sets turned up among the fifteen most-opened cameras on the site on 2026-10-30, counted from our own page-view log.

Built for pilots, and it shows

The sites carry up to four cameras each, pointed different ways and named for the direction they face: Makaha Ridge on Kauai has a northeast, a northwest and a southwest, and Loleau has all four corners. The frames arrive ten minutes apart, which is the interval we fetch the Hawaii set on, read from our own feed records on 2026-11-02. Ten minutes is slow for watching anything move, and exactly right for a pilot deciding whether a pass is open.

Hawaii came late. The FAA announced the expansion in a bulletin dated 2021-02-08: "The Hawaii project will install 23 camera facilities throughout the islands", with engineering surveys and site selections already finished on Kauai, Lanai, Maui and Molokai, and installations due to start on Kauai that March. Each facility "can accommodate up to four cameras". The agency said it picks locations by flight routes and "areas where weather conditions commonly affect and interrupt flight operations" - not at the airports people fly to, but at the places the weather goes wrong on the way. Five years on, the count is 35 sites, a dozen past the plan.

Ridges, trails, and one national park

Worked out from the published coordinates on 2026-10-31, the sites land like this: the Big Island has 11 sites and 42 cameras, Oahu 10 and 37, Maui 7 and 28, Kauai 4 and 15, Lanai 2 and 8, and Molokai 1 and 4.

Read the site names and the siting logic gives itself away. Munro Trail and Powerline Trail are hiking ridges. Makaha Ridge, Kahakuloa, North Shore and Makena Rd are headlands and coast roads. Holei Pali sits inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, looking east along the pali, and at 03:10 it had mist streaming across the slope in long grey bands with the ground lit well enough to see the scrub.

The pairs across the channels are the useful part for anyone who flies between islands. Upolu on the Big Island's north tip and Hana on Maui's east end look at each other across the Alenuihaha, 62.3 km apart in a straight line by their own coordinates. Kalaupapa and Kapalua sit either side of the Pailolo at 41.1 km. Open both ends and you can see whether the cloud you are looking at goes all the way across.

The ones I would open first

• Makaha Ridge, northeast on Kauai, refreshing every ten minutes, is the pick of them for shape: a cliff edge running out into open water with the sea texture visible right to the horizon. Worth catching in the hour after sunrise, when the light is along the cliff rather than behind it.
• Loleau, southeast is the one to open at night. At 03:07 it had a town's lights strung in a long line along the coast below, a dark ridge in the foreground, and a cloud deck catching just enough moonlight to read. The moon was 61% lit and still well up (USNO).
• Princeville, northeast stands on Kauai's north shore and points out along it, into the quarter the trades come from. Daylight, and early, before the cloud builds.
• Munro Trail, south sits on Lanai's ridge, and at 03:15 it was a flat grey field with no horizon in it at all. That is a ridge camera sitting inside the cloud, which for a pilot is the whole answer, and it is the clearest demonstration I found of what these are for.
• Kalaupapa, north looks out from the peninsula the National Park Service describes as "the isolated Kalaupapa Peninsula on the north shore of Molokai", under "some of the world's tallest sea cliffs" (NPS). It points north at open ocean, so between sunset and sunrise it gives you a black rectangle and nothing else, which is the honest trade for a camera that exists to show a pilot the cloud base.

Ten hours behind, and two sizes of frame

Every frame carries both stamps, UTC and HST, burned into the top corners along with the site name and the direction. Hawaii runs ten hours behind UTC and does not change for daylight saving, so the islands are lit from about 16:34 to 03:56 UTC: sunrise in Honolulu on 2026-10-31 was 06:34 and sunset 17:56 local (USNO). If you open one of these at lunchtime in London you are looking at the middle of the Hawaiian night, which is worth knowing before you decide a camera is broken.

Size varies by site rather than by camera. Of the 42 Hawaii frames I pulled on 2026-10-31 from pages like this one, 27 came back at 1920 by 1080 and 15 at 640 by 480, and every camera at a given site matched its siblings. Loleau, Makaha Ridge, Princeville, Holei Pali, Kaneohe Bay, Upolu, Waimea, Kapalua, Kekoa, Kahakuloa, Laie and North Shore are the full-size ones in that sample. Hana, Kaheawa, Kalaupapa, Kawailoa, Makena Rd, Munro Trail, Poopoomino and Powerline Trail come back small, so they are better in a window than full screen.

What is next

We will keep re-fetching these the way we do the rest of the fleet, and the Hawaii sites are now on my list to watch through the winter, when the north shores get the swell and the cloud sits lower.

The thing I would like to copy is the burn-in. Site name, camera direction, UTC and local time, all written into the pixels, so a frame that gets saved, reposted or cached still says exactly what it is and when it was taken. Almost nothing else we ingest does that. I would like to put that stamp in front of readers on the camera page rather than leaving it in the corner of the image. Is there another public camera network doing this properly, outside aviation? I have not found one yet, and I would like to be wrong.