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Full catalog/VJ146A3
VJ146A3·v2·dataset

Nighttime lights, monthly (VIIRS, NOAA-20, 15 arc-sec)

VIIRS/JPSS1 Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Monthly L3 Global 15 arc second Linear Lat Lon Grid V2
biosphere NASA LAADS Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. Monthly maps of how much light Earth gives off at night, capturing city lights and other human-made glow as well as natural nighttime light, at a fine global grid.

How it's made. Built from the Day-Night Band on the VIIRS sensor aboard the NOAA-20 satellite, then composited over each month and corrected for moonlight and atmospheric effects.

How & where you'd use it. Used to study where and how people live and use energy, track urban growth, and monitor changes in human activity and light pollution over time.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

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

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

The NOAA-20 (identified in its pre-launch phase as the Joint Polar Satellite System-1 (JPSS1)) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) supports a Day-Night Band (DNB) sensor that provides global daily measurements of nocturnal visible and near-infrared (NIR) light that are suitable for Earth system science and applications. The VIIRS DNB’s ultra-sensitivity in lowlight conditions enables us to generate a new set of science-quality nighttime products that manifest substantial improvements in sensor resolution and calibration when compared to the previous era of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System’s (DMSP/OLS) nighttime lights image products. Such improvements allow the VIIRS DNB products to better monitor both the magnitude and signature of nighttime phenomena, and anthropogenic sources of light emissions. VJ146A3 is the short-name for the monthly composited, moonlight- and atmosphere-corrected Nighttime Lights (NTL) product whose long-name is VIIRS/JPSS1 Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Monthly L3 Global 15 arc second Linear Lat Lon Grid. It contains 28 Science Data Sets (SDS). This v2.0 VJ146A3 collection is provided in standard Hierarchical Data Format–Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS5) format, and starts from January 1, 2018. This product has been validated through various field campaigns of opportunity supported under the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Human Planet Initiative’s Nighttime Product Validation (NPV) task. Additionally, the VJ146 product suite comes with ancillary and quality assessment layers indicating sources of error from the calibration, cloud mask, snow flag, and lunar irradiance, etc.

Get the data

vj146a3_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ146A3",
    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.