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nightlights-hd-1band·dataset

High-Definition Night-Time Lights

Black Marble High Definition Nightlights 1 band Dataset
land NASA VEDA COG
In plain English

What it measures. Maps the glow of artificial lights at night, where darker areas show fewer lights and less activity and brighter areas show more. The data is cleaned to remove moonlight and other interference.

How it's made. Built from NASA's Black Marble night-lights product, derived from satellite measurements of light at night.

How & where you'd use it. Reveals patterns of human activity, power availability, and outages after disasters.

What's measured

nightlights1band

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2017-07-21 → 2021-08-31
  • Spatial extent-90.304, 17.912, -65.575, 30.072
  • FormatsCOG

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The High Definition Nightlights dataset is processed to eliminate light sources, including moonlight reflectance and other interferences. Darker colors indicate fewer night lights and less activity. Lighter colors indicate more night lights and more activity.

Get the data

veda_access.py
# NASA VEDA — open STAC API, anonymous (cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://openveda.cloud/api/stac")
col = cat.get_collection("nightlights-hd-1band")
items = list(col.get_items())          # browse the analysis-ready COGs
# open an asset with rioxarray:
# import rioxarray; da = rioxarray.open_rasterio(items[0].assets["cog_default"].href)
NASA VEDA is an open STAC catalog — browse and stream the cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs anonymously (no login).