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Checking the NOAA OVATION feed

Updates and corrections

Answer

Every change to what Glow publishes, newest first. Corrections to a figure are logged here with the date and the cause. The next scheduled check of all quoted figures is 2026-12-31.

Change log

  1. 2026-09-30

    Town atlas, cloud climatology and Kp history

    • Added 1,218 towns from GeoNames in 21 countries, 720 of them with indexed pages, plus country and region hubs and month pages for 168 towns.
    • Added NASA POWER monthly cloud amount (2001 to 2020) for 381 1 degree cells, shown as a long-term average beside the live NWS value.
    • Added the GFZ Potsdam Kp record from 1932-01-01: a page per year and 111 G4 storm event pages.
    • Fixed the storm level for towns at 55 degrees geomagnetic or more: SWPC's 60 to 75 degree band needs no storm, and 55 to 60 needs G1 or less.
    • Typed coordinates now take the time zone of the nearest GeoNames town, and the tools search towns by name.
    • The sitemap is now an index of child sitemaps by page family.

  2. 2026-09-30

    Guides, storm levels, months and comparisons

    • Added 16 guides, each built on NOAA SWPC, USNO or NWS wording with a table computed for the 10 Glow towns.
    • Added pages for the NOAA storm levels G1 to G5, 12 month hubs, a page for each town in each month (120 in all), 8 town comparisons, 4 rankings, 3 region hubs, a glossary and a questions page.
    • Added the SWPC oval-edge rule (66 degrees geomagnetic at Kp 0, 2 degrees per Kp step) to the methodology, with the Kp each town needs.
    • Extended the sources ledger with quotes from the SWPC aurora, planetary K-index and geomagnetic storm pages, the USNO twilight definitions and the NWS sky condition terms, all checked on this date.

  3. 2026-09-30

    Redesign and 13 tools

    • Rebuilt the site around 13 tools, each answering one question from the live NOAA OVATION grid, NWS cloud, SunCalc darkness or the IGRF-14 dipole.
    • Re-checked every quoted SWPC figure against its source page.

  4. 2026-09-10

    Place data

    • Retrieved coordinates and time zones for the 10 towns from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).

Found an error? Use the contact page. See the sources ledger for every quoted figure and the methodology for every computed one.