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Checking the NOAA OVATION feed

Rankings

Aurora town rankings

Answer

Four rankings of the 10 Glow towns, each on one computed measure. Geomagnetic latitude says how close the oval sits. The three darkness rankings say how much usable night each town has in December, across the year and at the equinoxes SWPC favors.
4
rankings of 10 towns

Rankings by country and region

The four rankings below cover the 10 featured towns. For the full atlas, each country hub ranks all its towns by geomagnetic latitude, December darkness and dark-month cloud, and each region with 5 or more indexed towns has its own three rankings.

    The top three in each ranking

    First, second and third place per ranking
    Ranking1st2nd3rd
    Dipole latitudeReykjavik, 68.8°Yellowknife, 68.5°Tromsø, 67.5°
    Civil night, December 15Tromsø, 19.2 hFairbanks, 17.2 hReykjavik, 17.0 h
    Dark-season daysSeattle, 365 daysMinneapolis, 365 daysDuluth, 365 days
    Civil night, equinox averageBuffalo, 10.8 hPortland, Maine, 10.8 hMinneapolis, 10.8 h

    Why four rankings and no overall winner

    An overall aurora ranking would need weights: how many degrees of geomagnetic latitude are worth an hour of December night? No official source gives such a weight, and Glow does not invent one. Each ranking here uses a single measure you can check against its method.

    The rankings also disagree in useful ways. A town can sit high on the dipole but lose months to the midnight sun, which the dark-season ranking shows. Another can have long December nights but sit far from the oval. Read them together, then compare two finalists on a comparison page.

    Glow features 10 towns: 7 in the United States, plus Yellowknife, Reykjavik and Tromsø. The rankings cover only those 10. For any other place, the geomagnetic latitude calculator and the season finder take your own coordinates.

    Questions

    Which town is best for the northern lights overall?
    Glow does not publish an overall winner, because no official source says how to weigh latitude against darkness. Each ranking uses one measure.
    Which town sits closest to the auroral oval?
    Reykjavik, at 68.8° on the IGRF-14 dipole.
    Which town has the longest December nights?
    Tromsø, with 19.2 h of civil night on December 15.
    Do the rankings change?
    The geomagnetic ranking is fixed until the next IGRF model. The darkness rankings are recomputed for the coming dates and barely move year to year.
    Why only 10 towns?
    The rankings compare Glow's 10 featured towns. Every other atlas town has its own page, found by country, and the tools accept any coordinates.

    Sources and verification

    Quoted figures last checked against their sources on 2026-09-30; next review 2026-12-31. Computed figures come from SunCalc and the IGRF-14 dipole as described in the methodology. Every quote is listed in the sources ledger.