Who built this

My name is Chris Stubenrauch, and I build and run Aurora Forecast Tonight. I am a space weather forecaster and analyst, and I have spent my career on the operational side of this field: forecasting geomagnetic storms for satellite operators, working out why spacecraft fail when the environment turns hostile, and modeling how solar storms travel from the Sun to Earth.

Everything here is mine. The forecasts, the code, the maps and the writing. If a number on this site is wrong, there is exactly one person to hold responsible for it, and I think that is how it should be.

Intense red and green aurora filling the sky above a treeline during the May 10, 2024 G5 geomagnetic storm — **10 May 2024.** The strongest geomagnetic storm in more than twenty years, reaching G5 and putting aurora over places that had not seen it in a generation. Nights like this are rare. The point of this site is knowing which of the other ones are worth going outside for. *Photo: Chris Stubenrauch.*

How I got here

I studied Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Earth and Space Sciences at Stony Brook University, taking a bachelor's degree in each, then went on to a master's in Space Sciences at the University of North Dakota.

In 2018 I moved to Nebraska to become the lead space weather forecaster at the Department of Defense Space Weather Operations Center. For three and a half years I directed operational forecasting for DoD satellite operators and intelligence users, briefed senior defense officials and the White House Weather Team daily, and developed the SATSEAM signal attenuation model, which was adopted into operational workflows for satellite communications analysis. That job is where I learned the discipline this site runs on: you issue a forecast every single day, and the next morning everyone finds out whether you were right.

In 2020, while still forecasting, I started Space Weather Watch as an independent outreach project, a website and a set of social accounts explaining space weather to people who do not work in it. It grew well beyond what I expected, past 63,000 followers across X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads and Bluesky, and it is still the thing I enjoy most.

In 2021 I moved to NASA's Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office as a research scientist, where I spent four years leading the Space Weather Environmental Anomaly Attribution Team. We analysed more than a hundred spacecraft anomalies across upwards of thirty-five missions, tracing each one back to the environmental conditions that caused it. I built and applied coronal mass ejection and solar energetic particle propagation models used for mission risk planning, and worked alongside NASA Headquarters, NOAA and interagency partners to validate forecasts against what actually happened.

Aurora Forecast Tonight came out of all of it.

What I actually specialise in

Space weather is a wide field and nobody is expert in all of it. Mine is concentrated in four areas, and each one feeds directly into what this site does.

Spacecraft anomaly attribution

Working out why a satellite misbehaved, whether a given failure came from surface charging, deep dielectric charging, a single event upset caused by an energetic particle, or atmospheric drag during a storm. Doing that across a hundred-odd anomalies teaches you something specific and useful: how a storm's severity translates into physical consequences, and how often the obvious explanation turns out to be the wrong one.

Aurora forecasting

The operational question is never how strong the storm is. It is what will actually be visible, from where, and when. Those are different problems, and the gap between them is where most public aurora forecasting falls down.

Ensemble simulation of solar storms

CME arrival time and impact strength are genuinely uncertain, and a single deterministic model run hides that uncertainty rather than showing it. Ensemble runs, where you vary the inputs and watch how widely the outcomes spread, are how you find out whether a forecast is confident or merely specific. That habit is why this site gives you a probability instead of a promise.

Mathematics

Underneath all of it is geometry and statistics: dipole field approximations, coordinate transforms, interpolation across empirical tables, probability distributions. The magnetic latitude figure on every city page here comes straight out of that work.

Why this site exists

There is a great deal of noise around space weather. During a big storm, a dozen sources publish a dozen different forecasts, most of them reprinting the same NOAA numbers with different framing, some of them badly overstating what is coming. People end up with more information and less clarity.

I wanted a single source of truth for the one question people actually ask: can I see it from where I am tonight?

That answer has two halves, and almost nobody puts them together. Geomagnetic activity tells you how far south the aurora will reach. Cloud cover tells you whether you will see any of it. A severe storm under an overcast sky is nothing at all, while a modest storm under clear skies at the right latitude can be memorable. This site multiplies the two together instead of reporting one and hoping.

The other reason is simpler. I like explaining this. Space weather is one of the few areas of physics where the phenomenon is visible from your own backyard, and most people have never been told that the aurora reaching their town is a predictable consequence of something that happened on the Sun three days earlier. That is a good thing to be able to teach.

A group of people silhouetted against a bright pink and green aurora during the May 2024 geomagnetic storm — **The same night, with the team.** Forecasting a storm is one thing. Standing under one with the people who correctly predicted it is the part that makes the work worth doing. *Photo: Chris Stubenrauch.*

How the forecast is built

There is no proprietary model here and nothing hidden. The inputs are public, and the value is in how they are combined.

Geomagnetic activity, from the planetary K index and 3-day forecast published by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.
Cloud cover, from the National Weather Service gridded forecast inside the United States and Open-Meteo elsewhere, resolved to your coordinates rather than your region.
Magnetic latitude, computed from an offset dipole model, because what you can see depends on where you sit relative to Earth's magnetic pole, not where you sit on a map. Columbus, Ohio is about nine degrees further north magnetically than it is geographically.
Visibility thresholds, interpolated from the standard equatorward boundary table relating Kp to the auroral oval's reach, with a separate and lower threshold for long-exposure photography.

The result is a single percentage. It is a probability, not a guarantee. Aurora forecasting carries real and irreducible uncertainty, cloud forecasts are imperfect, and moonlight and local light pollution both matter. Anyone offering you certainty about tonight is selling something.

Where I am

I am based on the East Coast as of 2026, having spent the forecasting years in Nebraska under dark skies. I would like to get back to the Midwest eventually as it, among other things, allows an opportunity to chase the aurora properly again.

Get in touch

For press enquiries, use of the map, lodge and tour operator plans, or corrections to anything on this site, write to admin@auroraforecasttonight.com. If you think a forecast here was wrong, I would genuinely like to know. That is how it gets better.

Aurora Forecast Tonight is an independent commercial project operated by Space Weather Watch. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, the Department of Defense, or any other government agency. Professional experience is listed as background only and does not imply any official endorsement. Forecast data is derived from publicly available sources.