Aurora tonight in Seattle

Can you see the aurora borealis from Seattle?

Aurora sightings over Seattle are storm events. The city sits well south of the auroral oval, so a display means the geomagnetic field is doing something unusual — and the Kp number required is correspondingly high.

Seattle needs Kp 6, and cloud is the whole story. The latitude is reasonable — comparable to Copenhagen — but the Pacific Northwest is one of the cloudiest regions in the United States, and a Kp 6 storm that nobody sees because of overcast is the normal outcome rather than the exception.

Country

United States

Magnetic latitude

47.6°N

Geographic latitude

47.61°

Aurora threshold

Kp 6

Light pollution

Bortle 8

Deep-dark nights / yr

365

Sun at solar midnight

65.8° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Seattle aurora season

The calendar is not the constraint at Seattle — the sun clears 18° below the horizon on all 365 nights, so the sky is dark enough whatever month you pick. Pick the night with the clearest forecast instead, and expect the northern winter to give you the most hours in which to use it.

Daylight is not a limiting factor at Seattle: the sun gets 65.8° below the horizon on the darkest night of the year, and there is no stretch of the calendar when the sky fails to go dark. Everything then comes down to cloud and geomagnetic activity.

Where to go in Seattle

When a clear night does line up, head east over the passes or north along the coast; either direction removes both the city's light and, often, the low marine cloud.

Your viewing direction is fixed by Seattle's position relative to the magnetic pole: look north, low on the horizon at first, and find somewhere that side is open and unlit. The "best window" figure above is simply the first hour tonight where cloud cover falls under roughly 40% while the sky is dark enough here to show anything.

What Kp do you need in Seattle?

Here is what each Kp value would actually put in Seattle's sky — the row that matters is the one at Kp 6, which is where this city's magnetic latitude of 47.6° places its threshold:

At Bortle class 8, Seattle's own light is the biggest single obstacle between the forecast and what you actually see. A Kp 6 night that shows beautifully from open country shows as nothing from a lit street. When the verdict above is GO or MAYBE, budget the drive out of town into the evening.

How tonight's answer is calculated for Seattle

Tonight's verdict for Seattle weights five inputs: the live Kp forecast measured against this city's own Kp 6 threshold (35%), night-average cloud cover at 47.61°, -122.33° (25%), moon illumination (15%), the astronomical darkness window computed for this latitude (15%), and light pollution at Bortle class 8 (10%). The method, its data sources and its known limitations are documented on our methodology page. No signup, no app, no account — the page computes everything in your browser from NOAA and Open-Meteo directly. Anonymous analytics and Google's advertising script are the only third parties involved, and both are set out on our privacy page.