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Full catalog/VNP46A3
VNP46A3·v1·dataset

Nighttime lights, moon-corrected, monthly (VIIRS)

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

What it measures. Maps how bright Earth's surface glows at night each month, after correcting for moonlight and atmospheric effects so only true artificial and surface light remains. Includes layers on data quality, snow cover, and more.

How it's made. Built from daily VIIRS nighttime measurements on the Suomi-NPP satellite, combined into clean monthly composites as part of the Black Marble product suite.

How & where you'd use it. Used to study city growth, electricity access, economic activity, and disruptions like blackouts or disasters, going back to January 2012.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE RADIANCE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2012-01-01 → 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

VIIRS/NPP Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Monthly L3 Global 500m Linear Lat Lon Grid, with short-name VNP46A3, is the third nighttime lights (NTL) product in the Black Marble suite, which provides monthly composites generated from daily atmospherically- and lunar-BRDF-corrected NTL radiance to remove the influence of extraneous artifacts and biases. The VNP46A3 product contains 28 layers. They provide information on the NTL composite, the number of observations, quality, and standard deviation for multi-view zenith angle categories (near-nadir, off-nadir, and all angles), their snow-covered and snow-free statuses besides land-water mask, latitude and longitude coordinate information. They also include detailed information and description of the quality flags. This description pertains to the SNPP VIIRS Monthly Lunar BRDF-adjusted NTL collection, whose record starts from January 1st 2012.

Get the data

vnp46a3_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP46A3",
    version="1",
    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.