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Full catalog/VJ146A4
VJ146A4·v2·dataset

Nighttime lights, moonlight-adjusted yearly (NOAA-20)

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

What it measures. A yearly map of nighttime lights across the globe, capturing artificial light from cities and other human activity at night, at fine 15-arc-second resolution.

How it's made. Built from the NOAA-20 satellite's highly light-sensitive Day-Night Band, with corrections for moonlight and atmosphere so the human-made glow stands out clearly, composited into yearly images.

How & where you'd use it. Used to track urban growth, electrification, and human activity over time, offering sharper, better-calibrated detail than older nighttime-lights imagery.

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. VJ146A4 is the short-name for the yearly composited, moonlight- and atmosphere-corrected Nighttime Lights (NTL) product whose long-name is VIIRS/JPSS1 Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Yearly L3 Global 15 arc second Linear Lat Lon Grid. The v2.0 VJ146A4 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

vj146a4_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ146A4",
    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.