How to find clear skies when chasing the northern lights
There might be indications of great northern lights conditions happening right now, but that does not matter at all if the weather conditions suck.The most important factor you need to keep an eye on for a successful aurora hunt is cloud cover.
The golden rule of aurora hunting is: if you can’t see stars, you can’t see aurora. One great resource to keep an eye on cloud conditions now and into the near future is Windy (www.windy.com), which you can find on the web or on smartphone app stores. This is the app that every aurora hunter in Finnish Lapland uses.
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For Finnish Lapland, you’ll primarily want to compare the cloud coverage on two weather models on Windy, the ECMWF and ICON-EU. ECMWF has a habit of being more accurate when the temperature is above freezing, and ICON-EU more when the temperature is below freezing.
For real time cloud coverage, it’s best to check the Satellite tab which will allow you to see the current situation. If you scroll back in the timeline as well on a 6 hour timeframe, you can get an idea of where the clouds have been and which direction they’re currently moving in.
To assess the accuracy of the cloud coverage for each weather model, you should first look outside where you are and see which model is more accurate where you are at the current moment. If it’s cloudy and the model is telling you it should be 100% clear, it’s probably wrong. It’s good to note as well that these are models and that they are updated a few times a day.
You’ll also want to check the cloud coverage in different areas which you can do through watching webcams and cross referencing them with the cloud coverage forecast to see which is more accurate. Through doing this, you should be able to identify an area where you’ll have clear enough skies to potentially see the northern lights. You can check some of the webcams in Windy and another great resource is aurorawebcams.com
On some nights, the weather models will just be completely wrong. It will say 100% cloudy when there it’s 100% clear. It will say it’s perfectly clear when there’s clouds everywhere you drive. That’s just the way it is unfortunately, but webcams are your friend in these cases.
One thing I’d highly recommend is paying for the premium version of the app, it’s about 25 euro for one year and very much worth every penny if you’re any kind of weather enthusiast. With the premium version, the weather model updates are more regular than the free version and you’ll also be able to see the forecasts hour by hour, unlike the free version which only shows the forecast developments every 3 hours.
On clearer nights where there’s obvious big gaps in the clouds where you should be able to find clear skies with ease, you can probably get away with just having the free version. On trickier nights, it’s definitely worth having the premium version which updates more regularly.
Here’s a great example of a situation where Rovaniemi looks to be fully cloudy but completely clear kies are only a 30 or so kilometre drive away. If we head west/northwest away from Rovaniemi, we should reach clear skies quite quickly and hopefully have some northern lights waiting for us there!
On nights like these, don’t take tours that go to predetermined locations. You’ll only see aurora if you drive west so you’ll either want to drive yourself or go with a tour that chases clear skies. If you've booked a tour that only goes to a predetermined location, pray that their private spot isn’t east of Rovaniemi.
In this example, it looks like it’ll be a 2 hour drive from Rovaniemi up towards Kittilä to get the clearest skies. Everything else looks quite cloudy, though not too thick (100% cloud coverage is shown with the white colour).
Again, not a night to take a tour which only goes to predetermined locations or has a very short time/kilometre limit.
