VJ146A2: Daily Gap-Filled Lunar-Adjusted Nighttime Lights

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