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Full catalog/VNP46A4
VNP46A4·v1·dataset

Nighttime lights, moon-corrected, yearly (VIIRS)

VIIRS/NPP Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Yearly L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid
land NASA LAADS Level 3 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. The yearly version of the night-lights map: how brightly Earth's surface glows at night over a full year, with moonlight and atmospheric effects removed. Includes quality, snow, and land-water layers.

How it's made. Assembled from daily VIIRS nighttime readings on the Suomi-NPP satellite, composited into annual snapshots within the Black Marble suite.

How & where you'd use it. Good for comparing year-to-year changes in lighting, such as long-term urban growth or shifts in electricity use, with a record starting in 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
  • 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

VIIRS/NPP Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Yearly L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid, with short-name VNP46A4, 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 VNP46A4 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 yearly Lunar BRDF-Adjusted NTL collection record starts from January 1st 2012.

Get the data

vnp46a4_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP46A4",
    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.