Nighttime lights, raw (VIIRS, Suomi-NPP, near-real-time)
What it measures. Raw, calibrated readings of nighttime light from the Day/Night Band, a highly sensitive channel that detects everything from daylight down to faint glows at night, at about 750 m resolution. It records how much light the sensor saw.
How it's made. Generated in near-real-time from 6-minute chunks of VIIRS data on the Suomi-NPP satellite, with onboard calibration and corrections for stray light, as an early Level-1 swath product.
How & where you'd use it. A low-level input behind familiar nighttime-lights imagery used to study city lights, fires and human activity at night; most people use higher-level products built from it rather than this raw swath.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2022-01-25 → ongoing
- Measured bySuomi-NPP (VIIRS)
- Processing levelLevel 1B
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsnetCDF-4
- 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 VIIRS/NPP Day/Night Band 6-Min L1B Swath SDR 750m Near Real Time (NRT) product, short-name VNP02DNB_NRT is among the VIIRS Level 1 and Level 2 swath products that are generated from the processing of 6 minutes of VIIRS data acquired during the S-NPP satellite overpass. The Day/Night band (DNB) is a panchromatic channel covering the wavelengths from 500 nm to 900 nm, and sensitive to visible and near-infrared from daylight down to the low-level radiation observed at night. The VIIRS DNB is much improved from previous products due in large part to its complicated continuous on-board calibration. In addition, new-moon Earth observations are used to estimate and remove stray light. These corrections are a first of its kind to provide on-orbit radiometric calibration. The corrections made to the DNB data are provided by the NASA VIIRS Characterization Support Team and are likely to continue to evolve given this new methodology. The spatial resolution of the instrument at viewing nadir is approximately 750 m for the DNB and the Moderate-resolution Bands and and 375m for the Imagery bands. The DNB is aggregated to maintain nearly constant horizontal spatial resolution across the swath. As the DNB is sensitive to nighttime radiation over the full lunar cycle, the incoming solar and lunar radiation must be properly modeled to calculate the reflectance. However, the DNB is sensitive to more sources of radiation than just the sun and moon.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="VNP02DNB_NRT",
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 LANCEMODISBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.