VNP46A2: Daily Moonlight-Corrected Global Nighttime Lights

NASA's VNP46A2 product provides daily, gap-filled, lunar BRDF-adjusted nighttime lights data at a 15 arc-second resolution. The dataset contains seven science data layers, including corrected radiance, lunar irradiance, and quality flags for clouds and snow. Version 2.0 represents a significant update, changing the radiance data format to floating-point and extending coverage to include both land and water surfaces.

Use Cases

• Tracking urban expansion and economic activity based on temporal changes in corrected nighttime light radiance.
• Assessing disaster impacts and recovery by comparing gap-filled light levels before and after an event.
• Modeling energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions using spatially explicit light intensity data.
• Studying light pollution and its ecological effects using the lunar-irradiance-corrected radiance values.
• Calibrating and validating socio-economic models with a consistent, global time series of human settlement signals.

Strengths

• Provides daily global coverage, enabling high-frequency temporal analysis.
• Includes atmospheric and lunar correction (BRDF-adjusted), reducing noise from non-anthropogenic sources.
• Offers gap-filling to address data loss from clouds, increasing data completeness for analysis.
• Collection v2.0 improved data precision by switching from integer to floating-point radiance format.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable across all platforms.
• The 'last updated' date of 2026-04-09 appears to be a future date, indicating a potential metadata error.
• Documentation is referenced via an external PDF guide, requiring an additional step for full understanding.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing from the Suomi NPP (SNPP) satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB).

Time Range

Daily (time series).

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:14:04.566090

Geography

Global coverage at 15 arc-second (approximately 500m) resolution.