Aurora Globe
What the Aurora Globe Shows
The color overlay draped across the globe is NOAA's Ovation Aurora Model, the same real-time forecast that drives Aurora Hunter's other tools. Ovation estimates the probability that aurora will be visible at a given location over roughly the next 30 to 90 minutes, based on live solar wind measurements from spacecraft stationed a million miles upstream of Earth. Green and teal patches mark the fainter edges of the aurora oval; yellow, orange, and hot pink mark the strongest activity, usually concentrated in a ring around the magnetic poles that expands toward the mid-latitudes during a geomagnetic storm.
Because aurora is only visible after dark, the shaded half of the globe traces Earth's real-time day/night terminator. A bright patch of aurora oval only matters where it overlaps the night side - daylight washes out even a strong display, so a colorful patch on the sunlit side won't be visible to anyone standing there right now.
How to Use the Globe
Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom, and tilt with the navigation control in the corner. Green pins mark curated live aurora and all-sky cameras around the world - click one to jump straight to that camera's live feed and see current conditions firsthand instead of relying on the forecast alone. The overlay refreshes automatically as new Ovation data arrives from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, and the timestamp beneath the globe shows exactly when that data was last observed.
For a location-specific forecast with Kp index, Bz, cloud cover, and a plain-language visibility score, see the Northern Lights Forecast tool, or browse the flat Aurora Map version of this same live overlay.
