Live cameras in Karhula, Finland

Karhula is not a separate town but a district of Kotka, the port city on the Gulf of Finland in the Kymenlaakso region. It sits a few kilometers north of central Kotka along the Kymi River. Karhula grew as an industrial community: a glassworks opened here in 1888 and in the 1930s produced Alvar Aalto's glassware, before turning to bottles and finally closing in 2009. The Korkeakoski woodworks and the Sunila pulp mill, whose buildings and workers' housing were designed by Aalto, shaped the rest of the area. Karhula became a municipality of its own in 1951 and was merged into Kotka in 1977, when it had about 22,700 residents.

About these cameras

Because the map assigns each camera to its nearest place, this page collects roadside weather cameras from the northern part of Kotka and the countryside around it. They belong to Fintraffic's network of road-weather stations, whose pictures are released as open data through Digitraffic. Each station points one or more cameras down the road to show whether the surface is dry, wet, snowy or icy, and how far a driver can see. The pictures are stills that refresh every few minutes. The main east-west route along this coast, E18, and the road north toward Kouvola both serve the Kotka area, so traffic past these stations ranges from heavy trucks heading to the port to local commuters.

Kotka observes Finnish time, which is UTC+2 in winter and moves to UTC+3 with summer time from the last Sunday of March to the last Sunday of October. Around Christmas the sun is up for under six hours, setting about three in the afternoon; at midsummer it rises before four and sets near a quarter to eleven. Winter storms off the gulf can bring sudden snow squalls, the moments when these images are most useful.

Close by on the river is the Langinkoski imperial fishing lodge, built for Tsar Alexander III, and to the south lies Kotka's harbor, where the Vellamo maritime center and the summer Kotka Sea Days festival bring the waterfront to life.

Sources: Karhula - Wikipedia · Kotka - Wikipedia · Digitraffic road traffic data (Fintraffic).