The Iceland Meteorological Service measures solar activity as well as cloud cover, so if you’re already on the ground in Iceland then be sure to check them out here: en.vedur.is/forecasts/aurora.īe aware though that it is a very difficult thing to predict the chances of the Aurora being seen at any given time and because of this they tend to be pretty cautious in their predictions. Once those factors are in place the strength, or brightness, of the lights can be quite random depending on the amount of particles in the atmosphere at any given time, and seems to work out (very) roughly as three nights where the lights are bright and four or five nights where they are dimmer. And as the weather is a major factor in viewing them, non winter months might actually be preferable as there tends to be less snow showers and general cloud cover in those months.
#NORTHERN LIGHTS ICELAND FULL#
not in the full depths of winter is not such a good idea but this is wrong as night comes there is as much darkness then as in the middle of December, the only difference being that the sun sets later. You might imagine that seeing them in October or March, i.e. whether the sky will cloudy or clear, impossible and needs to be checked week to week and day to day. Darkness is easy to predict but long term predictions for the weather on any given day i.e. The first, obvious needs are darkness and a clear sky. You can generally see the northern lights in Iceland any time from mid September to mid April. Best Times To See The Northern Lights in Iceland 2022 Season: and Ireland that had rarely seen them before. So why would this be? Well, it is believed that during the Viking era solar activity was much weaker than now, and so the northern lights were a much rarer phenomena, generally only appearing during intense solar storms that happen only rarely but tend to produce lights that are more red in colour, as happened in 2014 when extra solar activity produced reddish lights that were visible all over northern Europe, and even in southerly regions of the U.K. Even then though there is doubt that they were actually referring to the northern lights, some speculate they could just as well have been describing rainbows. He, and other writers from those times, described them as either a red or multi coloured bridge between heaven and earth that some warriors had even managed to disappear through. The famous Icelandic poet and politician Snorri Sturluson did describe them though and gave them the name Bivröst or Moving Way in the old Norse language of the time the 1200s. During the height of the Viking times not much was written by them about anything, it was only from about the 11th century onwards that their Scandinavian descendants started writing down some of the ancient tales of the region. One intriguing aspect of the northern lights is how little they were mentioned in ancient Scandinavian texts. Furthermore, in Icelandic folklore the lights were supposed to protect mothers during childbirth but with the added twist that if an expectant mother was to look at them while in labour the child would arrive cross-eyed. Ok, forget all that science stuff, the northern lights are caused by magic, quite obviously. This meeting momentarily energizes these atom’s electrons and they then switch from this high energy state to their previous low energy state releasing the energy given to them in the form of photons of light aurora, which, en masse produces the effect which we know as the northern lights.
The mystical, mysterious effect the northern lights can have on people might be detracted somewhat by the sober scientific explanation of the phenomena but to a scientist there is no mystery the aurora borealis is quite simply the result of a meeting between highly charged particles from the sun being drawn towards the Earth’s poles and striking the atoms of various gases in the local atmosphere.
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