About the Aurora Forecast

Forecasting Aurora Borealis since 2004

Discover the mesmerizing beauty of the Northern Lights with the help of our aurora forecasting model. Whether you're a seasoned aurora hunter or a curious observer, this site provides you with a resource you can use to experience one of nature's most stunning phenomena.

Understand, accurate aurora forecasting is hard and the most critical factors to seeing the auroras comes down to location, persistence, luck, and location. The long-term forecasting of aurora is especially difficult as at the point of a solar event we don't know how fast, "dense" (for lack of a better term) or impactful it will be until typically 1 to 3 hours before an event reaches us. Sometimes we might predict an event in 2 days that traveled slower than estimated, misses Earth entirely, merely grazes us or arrives much sooner than expected and dissipates ahead of the predicted date.

If you want to learn more about the challenges in aurora forecasting check out the article "Why Do Aurora Forecasts Fail?".

Current Aurora Forecasts

Our aurora forecast prediction tool use data from several sources to feed our algorithm to give you reliable information about the anticipated intensity of aurora activity. For our live aurora prediction, we analyze the leading data over the last 3 hours on a rolling basis, sanitize the data to remove errant values and then look at trends and values falling outside the standard deviation for clues. These "clues" combined with 15-minute rolling averages of live data (noise reduction) are then applied to a proprietary weighting algorithm to inform the current forecast level.

This product has been developed to support a broad audience of aurora chasers who simply want to know whether chances for active aurora viewing opportunities are elevated / likely. While the forecast is highly data dependent, the design of this forecast is quite intentionally kept as easy to interpret as we can make it. We are actively working on a product that will expose the algorithm and provide a fun and interactive data dashboard that users can use to learn how changes in underlying values impact the probabilistic outcomes of the model - We hope to have this completed by January 2025.

Further, this forecast is optimized to predict the likely availability of visible aurora in areas where aurora is common. The forecasting model we've developed reflects the probability of seeing active aurora in areas north of 55 deg latitude in North America when skies are observed for 4 hours across solar midnight. Solar midnight isn't necessarily 12 o'clock midnight but rather is the time opposite to solar noon, when the Sun is closest to the nadir, and the night is equally distant between sunset and sunrise. Check out the best time of night for aurora borealis viewing for more information on timing-related topics.

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