Aurora Map
Why a Flat Map
This page trades the 3D Aurora Globe's rotate-and-tilt view for a straightforward, top-down layout - useful for quickly scanning a specific region, comparing several webcam locations at a glance, or on a phone, older device, or slower connection where a WebGL globe is overkill. The underlying data is identical: both pages draw from the same live NOAA Ovation feed and the same curated webcam list, just rendered differently.
Reading the Overlay
The color overlay is NOAA's Ovation Aurora Model, estimating the probability of visible aurora at a given location over roughly the next 30 to 90 minutes from live solar wind readings taken a million miles upstream of Earth. Faint green and teal sit at the outer edge of the aurora oval; yellow, orange, and hot pink mark its most active core, typically ringing the magnetic poles and pushing toward the mid-latitudes during a geomagnetic storm. Aurora is only visible after dark, so a colorful patch only matters wherever it's currently nighttime - daylight washes out even a strong display.
Drag to pan and scroll or pinch to zoom. Green pins mark curated live aurora and all-sky cameras - click one to jump straight to that camera's live feed. Nearby pins cluster together at lower zoom levels; zoom in or click a cluster to spread them out. For a location-specific forecast with Kp index, Bz, cloud cover, and a plain-language visibility score, see the Northern Lights Forecast tool.
