Track Santa NOW!

Find out when Santa will be coming to our part of the world.

Published 16th Dec 2015

NORAD Tracks Santa is back and this time you can download an app for your mobile.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is normally focussed on defending the US and Canadian airspace but every December they turn their attention to tracking the busiest man in the World, Santa.

Children all over the world are always keen to find out when Santa will be calling by their house, and thanks to the staff at NORAD this is made possible.

NORAD Tracks Santa is a tradition that started in 1955 when the American department store, Sears used the wrong phone number in a campaign allowing children to speak to Santa. When NORAD's predecessor CONAD started to take calls from children wanting to know Santa's whereabouts the Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup asked his staff to check their radars and update the kids on the big man's location.

Using a network for powerful radars and satellites NORAD can 'pinpoint' where Santa will be. In recent years they have even set up cameras around the world to capture him arriving in various places, the photos and even videos are immediately available to view on their website.

Since 1998 NORAD have been running the online tracker allowing children all over the world to find out where Santa is. The website is now in multiple languages and allows people to track Santa from 7am GMT on Christmas Eve, when he begins his epic journey in the Republic of Kiribati, a collection of 32 atolls in the Pacific Ocean.

class="norad-tracks-santa-countdown-async-script-loader"> // !! To embed multiple instances of this widget the 'id' of the script tag has to be made unique. !! // !! And the script tag 'id' should match the one in line 6 below !! (function () { var scriptId = 'norad-tracks-santa-countdown-embedder-e9dd91c2-9d67-4f9d-b8e2-a58aa92fcb8b'; function async_load() { var s = document.createElement('script');s.type = 'text/javascript';s.async = true; var theUrl = 'http://countdown.noradsanta.org/api/countdownwidget?id=' + scriptId; s.src = theUrl + ( theUrl.indexOf("?") >= 0 ? "&" : "?") + 'ref=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href); var embedder = document.getElementById(scriptId); embedder.parentNode.insertBefore(s, embedder); } if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent('onload', async_load); else window.addEventListener('load', async_load, false); })(); Stacey Knott, the NORAD track Santa spokesperson. "Of course, we can’t show every single one of Santa’s stops but we do show a lot of those around the world and every single country."

You can track Santa from 7am on Christmas Eve below.