Northern lights in Aberdeen: tonight’s chance

A city that faces the sunrise

Aberdeen's coastline runs north and south, and the city looks east across the North Sea toward Norway. For an aurora watcher that orientation is half useful. The sea is dark and the eastern sky is clear of buildings, but the aurora sits to the north, where the coast itself and the city's northern suburbs fill the view. The fix is to follow the coast north. Past Peterhead the shore curves west at Fraserburgh and begins to face the Moray Firth and the open water beyond, with nothing between the shingle and the northern horizon.

One step across a storm boundary

The difference between Aberdeen and Inverness looks tiny on paper, 0.5 degrees of magnetic latitude and about 0.3 Kp. It matters because it falls across a boundary of the NOAA scale: Inverness can see aurora on a G1 storm, Aberdeen generally needs a G2, and G2 storms are about a third as frequent. Edinburgh, farther south, needs about 0.6 Kp more again. On a night when the SWPC forecast shows a block right at Kp 5 or 6, the hour by hour answer in the tool can differ between the two northern cities, so it is worth checking both.

North along the coast road

The coast north of the city, past the dunes of the Ythan estuary toward Peterhead and Fraserburgh, is flat farmland with long views over the sea to the north and northeast. Every few miles leaves more of the city's glow behind, and Fraserburgh, at the corner of the Buchan coast, looks straight out over the Moray Firth's mouth toward the open North Sea. It is the natural drive on a night when the forecast for the city is a maybe.

Haar, fronts and the east coast advantage

The east of Scotland lies in the rain shadow of the Highlands, and Aberdeen gets fewer of the wet westerly fronts that soak Glasgow and the west coast. Its own weather problem is the haar, a cold sea fog that rolls in off the North Sea, mostly in spring and early summer. By autumn the haar is rarer, the nights are long, and November and December carry the most clear dark hours. A northerly or northwesterly wind after a front often brings the sharpest skies. For the Highland capital see the Inverness page; for the rest of the country, the UK page.