Northern Lights Forecast for Seattle

Northern Lights in Seattle

Seattle sits at 47.6°N on Puget Sound and averages about 200 cloudy days a year. The aurora reaches the city a few times in an active year, and cloud decides as many nights as the storm does.

Kerry Park and Golden Gardens inside the city

A faint glow or red tint low in the north can show from a dark spot during a G2 moderate storm. Anything that stands up above the horizon takes a G3 strong storm or more. In the strongest storms the aurora has been seen from inside the city, with crowds at Kerry Park and the Lynn Street lookout on Queen Anne, and photographed over Edmonds and Mukilteo.

Golden Gardens in Ballard puts the Sound and the Olympics in front of you and the streetlights behind. Phone cameras in night mode record pink and green that the eye reads as gray haze; see how to photograph the aurora with an iPhone.

North up the Sound to the Skagit flats

For darker sky, people drive north along the water.

• Richmond Beach Saltwater Park in Shoreline, about 10 miles north of downtown, is a beach park on the Sound.
• Lighthouse Park in Mukilteo, about 25 miles north beside the Whidbey Island ferry, has water to the west and north.
• The Skagit Valley flats around Mount Vernon, about 60 miles north on I-5, are open farmland with low horizons all round. Big Lake and Edison are among the places photographers have shot from.
• Deception Pass State Park, at the north end of Whidbey Island about 80 miles from Seattle, closes to day visitors at dusk. North Beach, west of the bridge, looks straight across the pass.

Artist Point and Sunrise are late-summer roads

The mountain viewpoints are a late-summer option only. The road to Artist Point on the Mount Baker Highway is open from about July to October, and the Sunrise road at Mount Rainier from late June or early July to late September or early October.

The Washington page covers the rest of the state, including Spokane east of the Cascades.