The space-weather desk · NOAA’s own numbers, live
The sun, the field,
the sky. Read properly.
Three instruments on one page. The planetary K-index on a dial, with the G1–G5 storm bands ruled where they actually sit. NOAA’s OVATION aurora forecast painted whole — all 65,160 cells of it, both hemispheres, over a graticule drawn by hand. And the GOES X-ray flux on a log rule, A to X, so a flare reads as the step it really is.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. Every number is the Space Weather Prediction Center’s own, fetched by this page from services.swpc.noaa.gov and redrawn every five minutes. Each panel says when its feed stamped itself, and what the feed does not say, the page does not invent.
Kp by the minute · the OVATION oval, 65,160 cells · GOES X-ray flux, A to X · NOAA SWPC’s own feeds · no key, no server
The dial
How hard the field is shaking.
Kp measures the disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field on a scale of 0 to 9. From 5 upward each step is a named storm level, G1 to G5 — they are ruled on the dial where they sit, so a quiet needle is visibly nowhere near them. The line beside the gauge is the same one-minute estimate across the whole window the feed publishes.
Planetary K-index
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
The oval
Where the sky goes green.
NOAA’s OVATION model forecasts the probability of visible aurora thirty to ninety minutes ahead, one value per degree of longitude and latitude — 65,160 cells. All of them are painted here, the whole planet at once, so the northern and southern ovals hang where they actually are: two rings around the magnetic poles, not a rumour at the top of a weather map.
OVATION forecast
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
Not read yet.
The flare wire
The sun, in X-rays, on a log rule.
Flares are classed A, B, C, M, X — each class ten times the flux of the one before, which is why they belong on a log scale and nowhere else. This is the GOES satellite’s X-ray wire over the feed’s six-hour window, the class bands ruled straight across, the current class stated in plain letters.
GOES X-ray flux
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
About
A desk, not a prophecy.
Kp is the planetary K-index: a 0–9 measure of how disturbed Earth’s magnetic field is, derived from ground magnetometers around the world. The dial runs on the SWPC’s one-minute estimate; the official value is filed every three hours. From Kp 5 the disturbance has a storm name — G1 minor through G5 extreme — and those bands are drawn on the dial exactly where they sit.
OVATION is NOAA’s auroral precipitation model. It takes the solar wind measured upstream of Earth and forecasts, roughly thirty to ninety minutes ahead, the probability of visible aurora for every degree of longitude and latitude. The map here is that grid painted whole — probability as ink — over a graticule this page draws itself. It is a model’s forecast, not a photograph, and the panel prints both of the model’s own timestamps: when it observed, and for when it forecasts.
X-ray classes grade solar flares by their soft X-ray flux at Earth: A, B, C, M, X, each class ten times the last, with a number for where in the band the peak fell — a C1.4 and an X1.4 are two letters and three decades apart. The wire is the GOES primary satellite’s 0.1–0.8 nm channel, the one the classes are defined on, with the 0.05–0.4 nm channel drawn fainter beside it.
All three feeds are the Space Weather Prediction Center’s own, published openly at services.swpc.noaa.gov and read by this page directly — no key, no relay, nothing measured here. The forecasts are NOAA’s; so are their limits. The Kp wire reaches back about six hours, the flare wire the same, and a feed that will not answer is reported as exactly that. Your hemisphere choice is remembered in this browser and nowhere else.