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Full catalog/VJ146A2
VJ146A2·v2·dataset

Nighttime lights, gap-filled (VIIRS, NOAA-20)

VIIRS/JPSS1 Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Daily L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid
land NASA LAADS Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. This maps the brightness of artificial nighttime lights across the globe at fine detail, after removing the effects of moonlight, atmosphere and clouds, and filling small gaps. It covers both land and water surfaces.

How it's made. Derived from the VIIRS day/night band on the NOAA-20 satellite as a daily corrected and gap-filled Level-3 product, part of NASA's 'Black Marble' nighttime-lights suite.

How & where you'd use it. Used to study human activity, electricity access, urban growth, disasters and power outages, and economic patterns visible in how brightly places are lit at night.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-01-19 → ongoing
  • Measured byNOAA-20 (VIIRS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsHDF5
  • StatusACTIVE

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 NOAA-20 VIIRS Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Daily L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid product, short-name VJ146A2 is a daily moonlight- and atmosphere-corrected Nighttime Lights (NTL) product. This product is available at 15 arc-second resolution and contains seven Science Data Sets (SDS) that include DNB BRDF-Corrected NTL, Gap-Filled DNB BRDF-Corrected NTL, DNB Lunar Irradiance, Latest High-Quality Retrieval, Mandatory Quality Flag, Cloud Mask Quality Flag, and Snow Flag. The VJ146A2 product files are provided in standard Hierarchical Data Format–Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS5) format. The current v2.0 collection contains several changes and differences relative to the previous v1.0 collection. These include radiance data format change from unsigned integer to floating-point, from exclusively for land surfaces coverage to both land and water surfaces, updated Mandatory_Quality_Flag layer, and others. Consult the v2.0-specific Black Marble [User Guide](https://landweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/userguide/BlackMarbleUserGuide_Collection2.0_20241203.pdf) for additional details.

Get the data

vj146a2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ146A2",
    version="2",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from LAADS
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.