[Snowy road seen from Joona Forsgren’s tour van]
[Car satnav, showing position]
[Road seen from van]
Joona Forsgren (interview): “So, we are going to the north side of Rovaniemi, about half an hour drive to a very private place, where there are no lights, no streetlights, nothing. It’s totally dark.”
[Side road seen from van]
[Van parked, lights on]
[Forsgren taking items from van]
[Forsgren walking to lakeside spot]
[Forsgren taking photograph]
[Northern Lights, seen from lakeside location]
Joona Forsgren (interview): “It’s been growing a lot. When I started it 4, 5 years ago, it was relatively calm and small groups only, and there were not so many tour operators as it is now. So now, there are tons of different tour operators in the city. And also, the tourism numbers have been growing every year.”
[Forsgren taking photograph]
[Northern Lights, seen from lakeside location]
Joona Forsgren (interview): “We have experienced really good Northern Lights, for night after night, really big Northern Lights and good activity. And yeah, it’s like I have never experienced. During my five-year career, I haven’t experienced like this big and these frequent Northern Lights. So yeah, it has been a really good.”
[Van parked, lights on]
Ishwari Chedda (interview): “It’s stunning. I mean, it’s something you have to see in your life. It’s beautiful, you don’t want to leave, you want to just see more and more.”
[Coronal mass ejections from the sun]
[Animation of solar wind, Earth’s magnetic field]
[Auroras seen from orbit]
[Mirjam Kellinsalmi, Observation Specialist, Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), speaking]
Mirjam Kellinsalmi (interview): “We are quite far north here in Finland. So, the Northern Lights are more common in these high latitude regions and especially in the Lapland region, here in Finland, we get the Northern Lights almost every night.”
[Coronal mass ejections from the sun]
[Auroras seen from orbit]
[Kellinsalmi working on computer]
[Computer screen, showing sunspot number]
Mirjam Kellinsalmi (interview): “Here we can see the last solar cycle. And then here is the current solar cycle. So, here we can see that we are at higher levels than in the last cycle.
Usually, it means more intense geomagnetic storms because these coronal mass ejections (CME), they are these big balls of plasma that are ejected from the sun. And when this plasma reaches Earth’s magnetic field, it causes geomagnetic storms here on Earth. So, during the solar maximum, we get more of these CMEs and more intense geomagnetic storms also, and also more Northern Lights. So, we get more of everything.”
[Visitors at Santa Claus Village, a winter-themed amusement park]
[Christmas tree lights]
[Camera outside Reijo Kortesalmi’s home]
[Kortesalmi checking camera]
[Kortesalmi walking into home and sitting at computer]
[Kortesalmi using computer mouse]
[Computer screen showing Aurora Alert]
Reijo Kortesalmi (interview): “I have my own cameras, they send images to my server. My software analyses, is there auroras or not? And if there is auroras, (the) customer gets alerts to their mobile phone.”
[Kortesalmi demonstrating smartphone app]
[Computer screen showing Aurora Alert]
Reijo Kortesalmi (interview): “There is almost every night, if the sky is clear, some sort of auroras, especially in autumn, there was a great auroras.”
[Northern Lights seen from lakeside location]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.