ICELANDNORTHERN LIGHTS MONITOR

—ICELAND / UTC

WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOOK?

—Forecast model

Hides solar altitude >−6°, including civil twilight. Playback skips these hourly slots.

NowVisible hoursNext 10 days
1 available hourly slot / second · cached frames

Weather and Kp coverage appear when data loads. No extrapolation beyond supplied forecasts.

VIEWING CONDITIONS

Tap Iceland to inspect an area
ONE VIEWING-SUITABILITY RUBRIC · NOT A SIGHTING PROBABILITY
Natural Earth · regional weather samples, not fine-scale observations
0–3 · Highly unlikely4–6 · Low7–9 · Moderate10–12 · HighUnknown

Loading spatial weather grid…

Ranked Iceland locations

All named areas · effective scores · unavailable last

Reykjavík

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VIEWING-SUITABILITY SCORE
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Waiting for data

Base unavailable · effective unavailable

Known weather + darkness points appear separately; not a full aurora score.

A rubric for comparing conditions, not a chance of seeing aurora.

Sky darkness

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Sun and static artificial skyglow combined

Cloud cover

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Hourly forecast model

Precipitation

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Selected hour total

Aurora activity

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Kp matched to this hour

Source timing appears when data loads.

How this map combines the conditions

Four factors receive 0–3 points each; their sum is the base score / 12. High 10–12, Moderate 7–9, Low 4–6, Highly unlikely 0–3 are rubric rankings, not sighting probabilities.

Cloud cover >90% or solar altitude >−6° overrides a complete base score to an effective score of zero. Exactly 90% and exactly −6° are not blocking. Missing required input leaves both scores unavailable, while any known blocker is still displayed.

Sky darkness combines the Sun and static artificial skyglow into one factor. Astronomical night ≤−18° gets 3; astronomical twilight (−18°,−12°] and nautical twilight (−12°,−6°] get 2; civil twilight (−6°,0°) gets 1 base point but triggers the solar override; daytime ≥0° gets 0. The omitted astronomical-twilight band is resolved conservatively at 2 points. High modeled artificial skyglow gives this factor 0, using the configurable threshold below.

Adjustable rubric heuristics

These hourly precipitation labels and skyglow cutoffs are viewing heuristics, not universal meteorological definitions. Iceland always uses the high-latitude Kp rubric.

Defaults: dry 0 mm; trace (0,0.1]; moderate (0.1,2.5]; heavy >2.5 mm/hour. High artificial skyglow ≥1 × natural sky (0.174 mcd/m²).

The next ten days remain selectable even when Kp or weather stops earlier; available weather + darkness points are explicitly partial and never ranked as a complete aurora score. NOAA Kp and current OVATION are never extended into missing future hours. History uses a separate past-48-hour window. Hide daylight hours is checked by default: hours whose brightest sampled Sun altitude is >−6° (including civil twilight) are removed from every time selector and playback. Exactly −6° remains visible. Dates clamp to the next visible hour, or the last if beyond the window. Playback moves one visible slot per second, visibly skipping hidden daytime gaps.

Weather is sampled regionally at 0.5° latitude × 0.75° longitude (about 35–56 km), from an underlying ~9 km ECMWF model. Each regional sample is held across its cell; no fine-scale weather interpolation or smoothing is invented. Skyglow uses authentic 0.1° display samples from the static World Atlas 2015. Coast-clipped color pixels do not imply 0.1° weather precision.

Selected-area calculations will appear here.

World Atlas 2015 · loading authentic static samples…

Full rubric, thresholds, licenses and sources ↗

Source times & data health CHECKING

Checking spatial cloud and precipitation model…

Refreshes pause while this page is hidden.

Current space weather & short-term aurora model

These are current source observations and short-term context. The combined map uses the Kp interval matched to your selected hour, and never stretches the current OVATION grid into future or past nights.

Latest Kp estimate

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IMF Bz · GSM

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Solar wind

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OVATION unavailable

No short-term model coverage for the selected hour.

Open NOAA’s actual short-term auroral oval ↗
Check the actual sky · operator cameras

Capture time and live status unverified.

Credit: Aurora Reykjavík / Landhotel. Each camera shows its own viewpoint; it does not represent the selected map area.