Google and NORAD Launch Santa Trackers for Christmas 2024

Google and NORAD have launched their respective Santa Trackers for Christmas 2024.

The Santa Tracker is an annual holiday tradition that allows people to follow the journey of Santa Claus as he travels around the world delivering presents on Christmas Eve.

The Google Santa Tracker is available online and as a mobile app, and it features a variety of interactive games, activities, and educational content related to Christmas and the winter holidays.






The NORAD Santa Tracker is run by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint military organization between the United States and Canada that is responsible for the air, land, and sea defense of North America. Working with Cesium, a platform for developers to build web-based 3D map apps, NORAD has built a 3D tracker that displays Santa's whereabouts. The 3D tracker app uses Bing Maps satellite imagery to give a realistic texture to the 3D globe rendered by the CesiumJS library.

For devices that do not support 3D, the app falls back to a 2D map. That tracker map displays a pin marking Santa's current location for you to follow. You can also learn more about each location Santa visits by clicking on an icon that brings up Wikipedia articles and Santa Cam videos that you can play. Visit the website here or download the iOS app here.




Notably, it's also possible to track Santa by calling 1-877-HI-NORAD. This year the NTS Call Center takes up residence in Hangar 123, a structure that portends to a military operation more becoming of two of NORAD's missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control. The new location harkens to the beginning of the program in 1955 when a young child, trying to reach Santa, mistakenly called the unlisted number of Continental Air Defense Command's Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, thus beginning NORAD's one-day mission of tracking Santa.

This year, Microsoft has announced that it's introduced Radar the Elf for Norad's tracker. Radar is an AI-powered question and answer elf designed to enhance your Santa tracking experience by answering questions about Santa and NORAD in 133 supported languages.

Radar can translate text on the fly, allowing for seamless multilingual interactions. Whether you're asking about Santa's current location or the history of NORAD's Santa tracking, Radar will provide answers in your preferred language.

Visit the Official NORAD Tracks Santa site to try Radar for yourself!