Where the northern and southern lights are likely right now

Live on the globe now: 2,600 tracked

This layer shows the auroral oval as a glowing band wrapped around each pole, plotted directly on the live globe. The data comes from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) and its OVATION Prime model, pulled from the ovation_aurora_latest.json feed. OVATION estimates the probability that you'd see aurora overhead, cell by cell, across a global grid. We keep the cells above about 8% probability, so what you see is the part of the oval where the lights are actually likely, not the faint statistical fringe. Each point carries its own probability percentage and which hemisphere it belongs to, so the northern lights and the southern lights both appear at once. The feed refreshes roughly every five minutes, which is how often OVATION publishes, so this is a near-term nowcast rather than a multi-day outlook: it tells you where aurora is likely in the next half hour, not next week. During a geomagnetic storm the oval pushes toward lower latitudes, and you'll watch the band thicken and drop south (or north, below the equator) here. Click any cell to inspect its exact probability and timestamp. Aurora is one of around 29 live layers you can solo, spin, and zoom on overwatch.earth.

Data source: NOAA SWPC