Editorial policy

Sources we accept

Space weather comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center and, for the definitive Kp, the GFZ Helmholtz Centre in Potsdam. Weather comes from the National Weather Service and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Magnetic coordinates come from the AACGM-v2 model published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, climate from NASA, positions from the Census Bureau. Aurora blogs, tour operators' pages and social media posts are read for questions people ask, never cited for a figure.

How a page is written

No magnetic latitude, Kp threshold, dark hour or cloud percentage is typed into a page: each one is computed from the data files and the engine at build time, so a correction to a rule changes every page that uses it. Statements about places, such as a dark sky park or a shoreline that faces north, are checked on an official or institutional page and cited at the bottom of the page. Each page says what the forecast cannot know.

Independence

Radif Partners has no partnership with tour operators, lodges, camera brands or app makers. If advertising is ever shown, it will be labelled and kept away from the tool, and it will never change an answer.

Updates and corrections

Live data refresh in your browser. The rules, sources and place data are reviewed at least every 12 months, and when SWPC changes a product or a data format. A reported error is checked against the data of the night concerned; when the site was wrong, the rule or the figure is corrected and the date at the top of the pages changes. Write through the contact page; the full method is on the method page.

Forecast, not a promise: the Kp forecast is issued for three-hour blocks and storms arrive early, late or not at all; clouds move faster than any forecast. The answer is a rule applied to public data, explained on the method page, and it is for guidance only: it does not replace the official SWPC alerts or your own look at the sky.