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United States Live Cameras — 89 official webcams

41 cameras from explore.org, 27 from the National Park Service, 18 from the Alaska Volcano Observatory and more — 89 in all. 33 are in Alaska, and 44 are live video, more than any country but Japan.

What you can see

There are 89 in all: 41 from explore.org, 27 from the National Park Service (NPS), 18 from the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), two from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and one from the Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The agency behind a camera tells you plainly what it is for.

All 41 explore.org cameras are live video, and most of them follow animals. At Brooks Falls brown bears wait for sockeye salmon climbing the falls, and four cameras cover black bears fishing Anan Creek from different angles. Elsewhere: puffins on Seal Island, California condors at Big Sur, the nightly bat flights out of Carlsbad Cavern and Bracken Cave, and sandhill cranes gathering on the Platte River. The provider forbids reproducing their images, so this site carries no sample frames for them.

The 27 NPS cameras exist to show the parks, and the names are ones you will know — Grand Canyon, Yosemite and the rest. Each card links to that park's own camera list, so one park can hold several: Isle Royale has ten.

The eighteen AVO cameras take one Alaskan volcano each. They are instruments, not scenery: the eruption at Great Sitkin that began in July 2021 is still going, with lava slowly filling the summit crater, and Mount Cleveland has an infrared camera as well, so the heat of the crater can be read after dark. Semisopochnoi sits at 179 degrees east, just short of the date line.

The USGS pair, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, are Hawaiian Volcano Observatory cameras whose aim and zoom are changed by staff as activity changes. The USFWS bald eagle nest watches a tree on the grounds of a training centre from three angles, continuously.

44 are live video and 45 are stills. 41 of the video cameras are explore.org; the other three are Old Faithful, Kilauea and the bald eagle nest.

89 cameras in United States

44 video, 45 still. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

Time zones dominate here. Between roughly midnight and 4 a.m. Japan time, almost every camera from the mainland to Hawaii is in daylight. Open them during the Japanese day and most are dark.

The thirty-three Alaskan cameras are worth thinking about separately. Anchorage runs seventeen hours behind Japan on summer time and eighteen in winter, so the Japanese evening lands on the Alaskan morning. In summer the night barely arrives and any hour is bright; in winter the daylight is short.

The explore.org animal cameras are all about season. The brown bears at Brooks Falls gather from late June through July, when the sockeye run; the black bears of Anan Creek in July and August; the Carlsbad bats in August and September; the Fairbanks aurora on autumn-to-spring nights. Each card copies the window the provider itself states. Cameras with no season given have something to watch at any time of year.

For the volcano cameras it comes down to cloud. The Aleutians are cloudy and foggy, and the observatory's daily records are full of the line that the camera could see nothing through the cloud. Expect to open them several times before catching a clear one.

Old Faithful erupts at intervals of anywhere from tens of minutes to about two hours. The bald eagle nest has no season and no hour — the only question is whether anything is home. The USGS and AVO cameras are monitoring instruments, not sightseeing.

Closer looks at cameras here

Agencies publishing the cameras on this page

The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.

To filter or re-sort, go to the camera list. You can narrow the cameras by format, region, subject and provider.