AuroraScout — Northern-Lights Viewing & Aurora-Tourism Site Index
Every lodge, tour operator, and tourism board chasing the northern lights has to answer one brutally specific question: where should a guest stand, and in which months, to actually see them? The free sources that could answer it sit in four unconnected silos. AuroraScout scores a curated set of 158 high-latitude viewing sites across 10 countries by fusing auroral reach (geomagnetic latitude vs the Kp-driven oval), clear-sky odds (30-year cloud climatology), darkness (astronomical night length × a sky-darkness proxy), and accessibility (nearest scheduled airport) into one deterministic 0–1 composite — then ranks every site and breaks it down month-by-month. The result is a clean best-place / best-season table that no single public source exposes on its own.
Coverage & headline figures
Built from four free, keyless, public sources and fused into one ranked, scored, exportable index. Deterministic and rule-based — no LLM anywhere in the pipeline. Every raw response is cached for reproducible, offline reruns.
Composite weights: auroral reach 0.40 · clear-sky 0.25 · darkness 0.25 · accessibility 0.10. Live snapshot 2026-06-30 22:07 UTC (current Kp 4.0; auroral oval down to 61.15° geomagnetic latitude). The contrarian, data-backed finding: the famously-marketed maritime hubs are cloud-limited — interior Alaska/Yukon/NWT (Coldfoot, Wiseman, Fort Yukon) clear ~45% of season nights, while coastal Iceland and northern Norway (Ísafjörður, Mehamn, Tórshavn) sit near 11–14%; and certified dark-sky parks (Galloway Forest, Tomintoul) crack the top 5 on darkness alone.
Sources (all free, keyless, public)
-
NOAA SWPC OVATION aurora nowcast
(
ovation_aurora_latest.json) → live aurora probability sampled per site + the current equatorward oval boundary. -
NOAA SWPC planetary K-index
(
planetary_k_index_1m.json) → the Kp that drives the climatological auroral-reach prior. -
NASA POWER cloud climatology
(
CLOUD_AMT, 30-yr monthly) → per-site clear-sky odds by month. -
OurAirports (
airports.csv) → nearest scheduled airport, size-weighted, for the accessibility score.
What’s in it — schema
Six cross-linked tables on a stable site_key.
site_scores is the headline deliverable — the
ranked best-place table; site_month_scores is the
month-by-month best-season breakdown; the rest are the scored
component layers that roll up into them.
| Table | Grain (one row =) | Notable columns | Rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| sites | one viewing site | geomagnetic_lat, bortle_estimate, nearest_airport_km | 158 |
| aurora_reach | one site | kp_visible_threshold, reach_score, nowcast_probability | 158 |
| cloud_climatology | one (site, month) | cloud_amount_pct, clear_sky_score | 1,896 |
| darkness | one (site, month) | astronomical_night_hours, darkness_score | 1,896 |
| site_scores | one site (best-place rank) | composite_score, rank, best_month, season_months | 158 |
| site_month_scores | one (site, month) | composite_score, is_aurora_season | 1,896 |
Columns in sites (the cross-link hub)
Columns in site_scores (the headline table)
Sample preview gated
A representative slice of scored sites — the kind of best-place picks the composite surfaces. Geomagnetic latitude, best season, and the live aurora nowcast are shown; the composite ranking score and its weighted sub-scores (auroral reach, clear-sky, darkness) — the proprietary, sellable columns — are redacted. Seven of 158 sites; ordering does not reflect the composite rank.
| Site | Region | Geomag. lat | Best season | Live nowcast | Aurora reach | Clear-sky | Darkness | Composite score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood Buffalo National Park | Alberta | 65.8° | Sep–Apr | 1% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Cambridge Bay | Nunavut | 76.1° | Oct–Mar | 9% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Deadhorse | Alaska | 70.4° | Oct–Mar | 2% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Galloway Forest Park | Scotland | 57.6° | Aug–Apr | 0% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Coldfoot | Alaska | 67.5° | Sep–Mar | 1% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Ilulissat | Greenland | 77.5° | Oct–Mar | 7% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
| Tromsø | Northern Norway | 67.4° | Oct–Mar | 13% | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• | 0.••• |
Request the full live sample
Get a live, end-to-end sample of AuroraScout — the ranked
site_scores best-place table with composite scores and
the four weighted sub-scores, plus the full month-by-month
best-season breakdown, per-region reports, and methodology.
No full dataset is downloadable from this page. Built from public-domain sources (NOAA SWPC, NASA POWER, OurAirports); not affiliated with NOAA, NASA, or any tourism board.