Nighttime Fire and Gas Flare Detection from NASA Black Marble Satellite Data

NASA Black Marble VNP46A1 product data provides daily top-of-atmosphere observations from the VIIRS Day/Night Band and thermal bands. The dataset is processed to detect nighttime combustion events, specifically fires and gas flaring. It is hosted on AWS Open Data by USRA and NASA Black Marble with no restrictions on use.

Use Cases

• Monitor wildfire activity and spread based on nighttime thermal anomaly detection.
• Track industrial gas flaring for emissions and economic activity analysis based on VIIRS thermal band data.
• Assess disaster impact and recovery by mapping persistent nighttime light sources from the Day/Night Band.
• Study light pollution and human activity patterns from daily top-of-atmosphere radiance data.

Strengths

• Data is derived from NASA's authoritative Black Marble VNP46A1 product.
• License explicitly states there are no restrictions on the use of this data.
• Detection leverages both the VIIRS Day/Night Band and thermal bands for multi-spectral analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

USRA and NASA Black Marble

Collection Method

Detection from daily top-of-atmosphere data from NASA's Black Marble VNP46A1 product using VIIRS Day/Night Band and VIIRS thermal bands.

Time Range

Daily data, but specific temporal coverage is unknown.

Freshness

Daily data product, but last update of this specific dataset is unknown.

Geography

Global coverage from NASA satellite observations.