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Full catalog/VNP46A2
VNP46A2·v2·dataset

Nighttime lights, gap-filled (VIIRS, Suomi-NPP)

VIIRS/NPP Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Daily L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid V2
land NASA LAADS Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. Daily city-and-fire lights at night, cleaned up so that moonlight and atmospheric haze are removed and cloudy gaps are filled in. Each grid cell also carries quality, cloud, and snow flags.

How it's made. Built from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS nighttime sensor by correcting for moonlight and atmosphere and gap-filling, producing a tidy daily global grid (part of the Black Marble suite).

How & where you'd use it. A ready-to-use product for mapping where and how brightly Earth is lit at night, tracking power outages and disasters, and studying urban growth and human activity over time.

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 SNPP VIIRS Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Daily L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid product, short-name VNP46A2 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 VNP46A2 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

vnp46a2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP46A2",
    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.