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Full catalog/VNP46A1
VNP46A1·v2·dataset

Nighttime lights, raw daily (VIIRS, Suomi-NPP)

VIIRS/NPP Daily Gridded Day Night Band 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid Night V2
land NASA LAADS Level 3 HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. How much light the satellite saw coming from Earth at night, recorded daily on a fine global grid, plus a rich set of supporting details like cloud flags, viewing angles, and how much the moon was lit.

How it's made. A raw, top-of-atmosphere nightlight measurement from the VIIRS Day/Night Band on Suomi-NPP, placed on a daily grid but not yet corrected for moonlight or atmosphere.

How & where you'd use it. The starting point for studying city lights, power outages, fishing fleets and economic activity at night. Because it still includes moonlight and cloud effects, most users prefer the corrected versions built from it.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2012-01-19 → ongoing
  • Measured bySuomi-NPP (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 VIIRS/NPP Daily Gridded Day Night Band 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid Night product, short-name VNP46A1 is a daily, top-of-atmosphere, at-sensor nighttime radiance product. This product is available at 15 arc-second spatial resolution from January 2012 onward. The VNP46A1/VJ146A1 product contains 26 Science Data Sets (SDS) that include sensor radiance, zenith and azimuth angles (at-sensor, solar, and lunar), cloud-mask flags, time, shortwave IR radiance, brightness temperatures, VIIRS quality flags, moon phase angle, and moon illumination fraction. It also provides Quality Flag (QF) information specific to the cloud-mask, VIIRS moderate-resolution bands M10, M11, M12, M13, M15, M16, and DNB. 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.

Get the data

vnp46a1_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP46A1",
    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.