Given what we know about solar flares and whatever else is involved in producing the Northern Lights, is it possible that I can schedule a flight to Barrow for a certain date and have a 90% expectation of seeing them (barring clouds)? Could I get an advance notice of even, say, 14-16 hours (my estimate of the flight time from St. Louis to Barrow, given layovers)?
You need this site:
a strong disruption can go more than one day.
Pretty good site.
But most of the info comes from this source: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/. So once you learn to navigate the aurora info there you can cut out the middleman. As an example, here’s the 3-day auroral forecast Products | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
For the OP: Why Barrow? The aurora is a ring more or less centered on the magnetic North Pole, and as such traveling to the highest possible latitude is not necessarily the best location for viewing.
I just used Barrow as shorthand for a northern-latitude city with an airport. Not for nothing, Barrow is right smack in the middle of the the green line in today’s forecast provided in the link in Post #2.
The site I like is University of Alaska; a little simpler to use.
Can they be predicted more than a day or two out? I haven’t seen any good predictions.
A really strong active region can last for months (at various levels of activity), and the Sun rotates with a period of about a month, so a really good storm is sometimes followed by another one about a month later. It’s not all that reliable, but it’s better than random chance.
On yet another level, there’s also the 11-year solar cycle: During solar maximum, sunspots, geomagnetic storms, and aurorae are much more common than during solar minimum. That won’t help you plan day-to-day, though.
Push comes to shove, if you really want to maximize your chance of seeing an aurora, your best bet is to wait until solar max, then book a flight to some suitably-northerly location which tends to get clear skies, and be prepared to wait it out.
My gf just got back from Iceland. There she was told it is all just guesswork, even if it’s educated guesswork. She saw what she says was amazing, but was told it was nothing compared to what sometimes happens.
There was a team there to report on the solar eclipse. They hired a boat to take them out, but the clouds didn’t cooperate. Meanwhile, my gf was in Rinkydink and the skies were clear. She was in a pub when someone alerted them it was happening. Everyone ran outside and awe ensued.
(I know the town isn’t Rinkydink, but that’s as close as I can get to the correct spelling/pronunciation)
“The capital city” is easy to spell and even works in more than one country. 
Heh. Point taken.
On this page, the text box on the top left gives Kp predictions (if the Kp really is 6 or greater, I’ve a good chance of seeing aurora here in Chicago). http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusiasts
At the bottom of the page there’s a link to Report and Forecast of Solar and Geophysical Activity. On THAT page, at the bottom, it gives probabilities for the different levels of geomagnetic activity, much like precipitation probabilities, although it’s likely they’re not as accurate.