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Description
NASA's NOAA-20 VIIRS Gap-Filled Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Daily L3 Global 15 arc-second Linear Lat Lon Grid product (VJ146A2) provides daily, atmospherically corrected observations of Earth's nighttime lights. It contains seven science data sets, including gap-filled radiance, lunar irradiance, and quality flags, at a 15 arc-second resolution. The current Collection 2.0 version features floating-point radiance data and coverage extended to both land and water surfaces.
Use Cases
Tracking urban expansion and economic activity based on gap-filled nighttime light radiance.
Assessing light pollution and its environmental impacts using atmospherically corrected radiance values.
Calibrating other remote sensing products with the provided DNB lunar irradiance data.
Filtering data for clear-sky analysis using the cloud mask and mandatory quality flag layers.
Strengths
Provides daily temporal resolution for high-frequency change detection.
Offers a 15 arc-second spatial resolution (~500m at equator) for detailed analysis.
Includes gap-filling to address data loss from clouds and other obstructions.
Collection 2.0 represents a major update with floating-point radiance and global land+water coverage.
Limitations
Key metadata like row count, file size, and specific license terms are missing or conflict across sources.
Data is provided in HDF-EOS5 format, which requires specialized tools for access and processing.
The 'last updated' date of 2026-04-09 appears to be a future date, indicating potential metadata error.
Provenance
Source
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Collection Method
Satellite observation from the NOAA-20 spacecraft's VIIRS instrument.
Freshness
2026-04-09 21:04:58.933498
Geography
Global
License is listed as 'other-license-specified'; users must consult the official Black Marble User Guide for specific terms. Data is in HDF-EOS5 format.