Why doesn’t AW UK issue alerts in advance?
At AuroraWatch UK, we issue alerts of real-time auroral visibility. We do this by measuring the disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field as it happens. Based on the amount of disturbance we record, we issue a variety of alerts.
To predict when an aurora might be visible in advance, with good accuracy, is actually quite difficult. Even the best models used by space weather scientists are quite coarse. We refer our users to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center for space weather alerts and aurora predictions.