Where is the auroral oval right now?

Fairbanks, Alaska sits at 64.84N 147.72W, inside cell 65N 212E on the feed's 0 to 359 longitude scale. On this request that cell reads 9%. The dashed periwinkle rings are the centered dipole latitudes 50, 55 and 60. Fairbanks sits at 65.7 degrees dipole latitude, well poleward of all three.

Select any point on the map to read its cell. The readout names the cell, its value and the nearest of the 10 Glow places by great-circle distance.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center publishes the OVATION model as a grid of 1 degree cells covering both hemispheres. Each cell holds a number from 0 to 100 for the forecast time in the file. Glow's server reads the same cached copy that every other page uses, drops cells below 1% and cells equatorward of 30 degrees, and sends the rest to your browser as runs along each latitude.

The map is a polar azimuthal equidistant projection: the pole sits at the center and each ring outward is one more degree of latitude, drawn to scale. North America is at the bottom of the northern view. The rim is 25 degrees latitude.

Cell color follows one ramp. Green opacity climbs in steps of 5% from 1% up to 50%. Cells above 50% switch to red, the only warm color on the plate. There is no smoothing between cells: each wedge on the map is one cell in the file.

The auroral oval is centered on the geomagnetic pole, not the geographic one. Glow computes that pole from the first three IGRF-14 coefficients published by NOAA NCEI. The result is 80.79N 72.76W, in the Canadian Arctic. The dashed rings trace dipole latitudes 50, 55 and 60 around that pole. They bulge south over North America and north over Siberia, the same tilt you see in the oval.

The ringed dots are Glow's 10 featured places. Their labels make it easy to compare a live oval with towns you know: when the green band covers Fairbanks and Yellowknife but stops short of Duluth, the 10% edge sits between them.

A cell value describes the sky over that cell. SWPC notes that bright aurora can be seen from as far as 1000 km away, low on the horizon, so a town outside the green band can still see it. The southern edge tool draws that 1000 km line.

The map carries no cloud, moon or daylight. Part of the oval is always on the day side of Earth. When the feed is older than 2 hours the map is left empty with a note, because an old oval drawn as live would mislead.

The coastline is Natural Earth 1:50m land, public domain, simplified and clipped inside Glow. See the Natural Earth terms.