Tromsø is not the best place for northern lights

This post might stir up some controversy or ignite some keyboard warriors but I’m going for it anyway. Here’s goes. Tromsø is NOT the best place in Norway for the northern lights. Lofoten is. Tromsø just has more marketing on account of their plethora of Aurora hunt tours. Here in Lofoten we have five guiding companies that do regular northern lights tours whereas on Tromsø there are around 50. That kind of scale requires some serious marketing, which is why it’s only the marketing that says Tromsø is the best place, and not the reality. The reality is that although Tromsø and Lofoten are at similar latitudes, meaning we’re both more or less at the centre of the auroral oval, the weather systems that affect Tromsø are far worse than ours in Lofoten. To tackle this, many of the Aurora hunts in Tromsø actually drive towards Nordkjosbotn and into Skibotndalen, ending up passing Kilpisjärvi, Finnish Lapland before they find clear skies and dancing lights. In Lofoten on the other hand, our season of approximately 238 nights each year from August 20th until April 15th tends to have overcast conditions that prevent Aurora sightings on only 20 nights or so. This gives us a success rate in Lofoten of 92% without having to travel for more than one hour from our starting point, versus the 2.5 hour journey each way from Tromsø to Kilpisjärvi.

The reason the weather is so dramatically different in Lofoten compared to Tromsø is because in Lofoten we are largely subject to an Arctic Maritime climate, balanced by the effects of the Gulf Stream, but in Tromsø the weather system is more of a Polar Continental climate, meaning that land mass has more influence. When we have clouds in Lofoten they tend to be broken, or we can use the currents between the islands and mountains to find large openings, but in Tromsø if it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy.

Let me put it another way. I had the freedom to choose where to live, and my decision was based on the northern lights because that’s my area of expertise (I’ve authored an Amazon best selling book about it, after all) and my shortlist was Lofoten, Tromsø, Finnish/Swedish Lapland, or Iceland. I spent two years making a decision, and that decision was Lofoten owing to the archipelago having the best skies for northern lights. The moral of the story here is this: Tromsø is said to be the best place for northern lights, but it’s all just marketing. The best place is Lofoten.