Aurora alerts in Forecast Bar, in short
- What you get
- A push notification when aurora visibility at your location is forecast to cross a score you choose.
- The score
- 0–10 for your coordinates, with a plain-language summary of what is helping or hurting the odds tonight.
- Where it works
- Anywhere. The score is computed from your latitude and longitude, so it is not limited to one country.
- Platforms
- iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV.
- Plan
- Aurora visibility alerts are part of Forecast Bar Gold on iOS and Pro on Mac.
- Cost
- Free 24-hour access to everything, then an optional subscription with a 7-day trial.
A visibility score for your location — not a global index.
Most aurora tools hand you a planetary Kp number and leave the interpretation to you. Forecast Bar scores the actual odds of seeing the aurora from your coordinates and tells you, in a sentence, what is driving that number tonight.
- A 0–10 visibility score computed for your latitude and longitude
- A plain-language summary instead of raw geomagnetic indices
- The specific reasons behind tonight's score, listed out
- Updated through the evening as the forecast changes
Get woken up for a 9. Ignore a 4.
A notification you can't tune is a notification you turn off. Aurora alerts use the same custom threshold system as the rest of Forecast Bar: pick the score that is worth your evening, and nothing below it reaches you.
- Set the visibility score that earns a notification
- Choose how far ahead of the window you want warning
- Quiet hours hold routine alerts overnight
- Alerts arrive on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch
The aurora alert lives inside your actual weather app.
Cloud cover decides whether you see anything, and cloud cover is a weather question. Forecast Bar puts the aurora score next to the forecast, the hourly cloud cover, and the radar you would have checked anyway — so you're not switching between two apps at 11 p.m.
- Hourly cloud cover and dew point in the same app
- Radar and satellite to see whether the sky will actually clear
- Moonrise and moonset, because a full moon washes out a faint display
- Sunset and civil twilight times for when it gets properly dark
An honest note: aurora forecasting is probabilistic.
Nobody can promise you the northern lights. Solar wind conditions change on timescales shorter than any forecast horizon, and a clear sky can go overcast in an hour. A high score means the conditions are favourable — not that a display is guaranteed.
What Forecast Bar can honestly do is stop you missing the good nights. If you live somewhere the aurora is occasionally visible, the failure mode that actually costs you is sleeping through it, and that is the one an alert fixes.
Questions about aurora alerts
Does Forecast Bar send northern lights alerts?
How does Forecast Bar decide whether the aurora will be visible?
Can I choose how strong the aurora has to be before I get notified?
Do aurora alerts work outside the United States?
Will an aurora alert wake me up in the middle of the night?
Which Forecast Bar plan includes aurora alerts?
How much does Forecast Bar cost?
Stop missing the good nights.
Try every alert type free for 24 hours — no card, no account required to start.
Free 24-hour access, then optional subscription with 7-day trial. Mac and iOS plans are separate; Apple TV is included with Forecast Bar Gold on iOS.
More from Forecast Bar
Eclipse, supermoon & solstice alerts
Lunar and solar eclipses visible from your location, supermoons, solstices and equinoxes — with warning.
Sunset & sunrise quality forecast
A 0–10 score for tonight's sunset, the golden-light window, and an alert when a good one is coming.
Alerts that matter
The whole alert lineup in one place — severe weather, nowcasts, and custom thresholds.