There are several services that we can check before going out into the cold, but always remember that a forecast is just an estimation of the activity, and it can happen that low activity nights end up showing great northern lights, and vice versa.
There are several web pages that show the activity, here you can find a rough selection:
- The Space Weather prediction center offers the Ovation, a product that shows the probability (in percentage) of seeing northern lights in the short term: http://swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/
- Another prediction form from the Space Weather prediction center: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html
- The geophysical institute of Alaska has daily predictions, and on the right side you can find short term forecasts: http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast
- The university of Tromsø has a magnetometer that measures the activity. Please note that this information shows what has happened, and not what will happen. As a rule of thumb, each time a peak is shown in the graph, a northern light has happened in the viccinity of Tromsø: http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/config.cgi?site=tro2a&stack=tro2a&Kindice=tro2a&ActIx=tro2a&getabove=+Get+above+config
- For more information, news and updates about the solar activity, the Space Weather webpage is a very useful resource: http://www.spaceweather.com/
- If you live in Norway, http://www.yr.no/ has a detailed weather forecast (hour by hour) where you can see the cloud cover, and long term forecasts too
- An All Sky Camera (ASC) from Tromsø. It refreshes the picture every two minutes, automatically! If you want to know how is the night going in Tromsø, check this link! http://fox.phys.uit.no/ASC/
- Another All Sky Camera from Fairbanks, Alaska: http://www.ronnmurrayphoto.com/NorthernLights-AuroraCamera/AlaskaAuroraCam
If you want to buy northern light souvenirs, you should definitely check http://www.northernlightmagic.no, they have a really nice selection of products!
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