VIIRS/NPP Day/Night Band: 6-Minute Swath Imagery

VIIRS/NPP Day/Night Band 6-Min L1B Swath SDR 750m NRT provides calibrated satellite imagery from the Suomi NPP satellite's Day/Night Band (DNB). The DNB is a panchromatic channel sensitive to visible and near-infrared radiation from 500 nm to 900 nm, enabling observation from daylight down to low-light conditions at night. Data products are generated from 6-minute swaths and feature on-orbit radiometric calibration with stray light corrections.

Use Cases

• Monitoring urban light pollution and nighttime human activity based on calibrated radiance measurements.
• Analyzing cloud properties and atmospheric composition at night using the panchromatic spectral sensitivity.
• Studying lunar illumination effects on Earth's surface across the full lunar cycle.
• Detecting and tracking low-light sources like fires, gas flares, or fishing boats.
• Validating and improving radiative transfer models that account for solar, lunar, and other radiation sources.

Strengths

• Features continuous on-board calibration and stray light removal using new-moon observations, a first-of-its-kind on-orbit radiometric method.
• Maintains a nearly constant horizontal spatial resolution of approximately 750 meters across the swath.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals established importance and institutional support.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable across all sources.
• The license is inconsistently reported as 'other-license-specified' or 'None', requiring user verification.
• The dataset's update history is partially missing, with only one source providing a last updated date.

Provenance

Source

NASA VIIRS Characterization Support Team, LANCEMODIS

Collection Method

Generated from processing 6 minutes of VIIRS data acquired during the Suomi NPP (S-NPP) satellite overpass.

Time Range

Acquisition time is encoded in the file naming convention (YYYYDDD.HHMM), but a specific date range is not provided.

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:01:32.768960

Geography

Global swath coverage from the S-NPP satellite orbit.