Live hurricane cameras, from Jennette's Pier to the Bolivar ferry

There is a camera bolted to the deck of Jennette's Pier at Nags Head that looks south down the surf zone and hands you a new 30-second slice of video for as long as you leave it open. It is not a resort camera pointed at a nice view. It was put there to measure how far up the beach the waves run, which makes it one of the few cameras on the US coast that was designed for the week you actually want to look at it.

The 45 cameras that exist to be watched in bad weather

Jennette's Pier belongs to WebCOOS, a webcam network that SECOORA runs on NOAA money. The grant is $1,149,096 over three years, and the project page is blunt about what the pictures are for: "webcam data will help NOAA validate and improve their rip current forecast model, and USGS will rely on webcam observations of wave run-up for research on beach erosion, overwash, and inundation." University of North Carolina Wilmington, the University of South Carolina, USGS and the Army Corps are all named partners. Erosion, overwash and inundation are the three things a hurricane does to a beach, in that order.

Counted from our own index on 2026-09-27, there are 45 live WebCOOS cameras, every single one of them HLS video on a 30-second update. The ones on the hurricane coast, west to east:

• UTMSI Pier, Port Aransas, Texas has a gulf-facing view and a harbour-facing one from the same marine science pier, which is the pair you want: the Gulf side shows you the sea state, the harbour side shows you whether the water is coming over the bulkhead.
• Phoenix Gulf Towers at Gulf Shores, Alabama looks straight out from a high floor, so it keeps a horizon when the ground-level cams are full of spray.
• Tidewater Beach Resort, Panama City Beach points west along the sand, which is the useful direction on the Panhandle, because that is where the weather arrives from.
• Charleston Harbor and the North Inlet-Winyah Bay research reserve dock at Georgetown are both inside water rather than on the open beach. Harbour and estuary cameras are where surge reads most clearly, because there is a dock or a piling in frame to measure it against.
• Oak Island, North Carolina faces east down the beach, and Masonboro Inlet at Wrightsville Beach watches the gap between two jetties where an onshore swell stacks up first.
• Corolla, at the Sailfish Street beach access is the northernmost of them, on the stretch of the Outer Banks where the dune line is the only thing between the ocean and the road.

Worth knowing about all of these: a 30-second HLS feed keeps playing when a page is left open, so one browser tab is enough. Of the 115 beach-category cameras I counted across the eight Gulf and Atlantic states this morning, 71 update every 30 seconds and 41 are a still image every 150 seconds, which is fine for "is it raining" and no use at all for watching a wave.

The roads go under before the beach does

The cameras people reach for in a storm are the beach ones. The cameras that tell you what is happening are usually on a road, because a causeway floods at a foot of water and a beach does not look different until several feet.

TxDOT points three cameras at the Galveston end of the ferry crossing, at French Town Road, 7th and 15th, all stills on a 60-second cycle. The crossing itself is 2.7 miles and about 18 minutes, seven vessels, roughly 70 vehicles each, running 24 hours a day. Bolivar Peninsula has no bridge. When those queue cameras show an empty ramp in the middle of an evacuation, the ferry has stopped, and that is a bigger fact than anything the beach cams are showing.

Georgia puts a camera on SR 26/US 80 at 1st Street and Jones Avenue, 30-second stills. US-80 is the only road onto Tybee Island and it goes under on a bad high tide with no storm involved. The Tybee camera sits in Georgia's statewide 511 set, so the road onto the island is watched the same way the interstates are.

South Carolina runs four HLS cameras along the Folly Road approach to Folly Beach, including Terns Nest, and Florida has the Pinellas Bayway toll plaza covering the St Pete Beach causeway. State DOT cameras have a second advantage in a storm beyond where they point, which is that they sit on cabinets with battery backup and the department's own network, rather than on a beachfront hotel's wifi.

The thin part of this is the central Gulf. Counting beach-category cameras in our index today gives Florida 76, South Carolina 17, Texas 8, North Carolina 6, Georgia 3, Alabama 3, and one each for Louisiana and Mississippi, so the coast from Grand Isle to Gulfport is nearly all DOT cameras and one beach cam at Waveland.

Nothing is coming ashore this week, which is why now is the time to pick them

At 01:05 UTC on 2026-09-27 the National Hurricane Center had Tropical Depression Fay at 29.8N 43.9W with 35 mph winds, drifting south in the open Atlantic on advisory 27, and Gonzalo post-tropical on its final advisory. The eastern Pacific was the busier basin: Hurricane Polo at 140 mph and Hurricane Odalys at 90 mph, both well offshore of Mexico. Nothing threatening a US coastline.

That is the right week for this. The Atlantic season runs 1 June to 30 November and peaks on 10 September, with an average season of 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes over 1991 to 2020, so there are two months left and the busiest part is behind us. Finding your six cameras and bookmarking them is a twenty-minute job now. During a watch it competes with packing.

One thing to be clear about, since a camera invites it: a webcam is not a warning. The NHC advisory and your county emergency management are the things that tell you to leave, and a picture of a calm beach forty miles from an eyewall has talked people into staying before.

What we will do next

We re-fetch every camera on the site on a rolling health check, and the number I want from the next Atlantic landfall is a simple one: of the WebCOOS and DOT cameras named above, how many were still answering six hours after the eye came ashore, and how many of the hotel and pier cams were. My guess is that the DOT cabinets and the research piers win it easily and the private feeds drop out in the first hour, but a guess is all it is, because I have never counted.

If you know a coastal camera that stayed up through a landfall, I would like to hear which one, because that is the list worth building.