Black Marble/Nighttime Lights

Overview

NASA’s Black Marble represents a suite of four Day-Night Band (DNB)-based visible standard products that offer vast improvements in sensor resolution and calibration over the previous era of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System’s nighttime lights image products. Derived from the VIIRS instrument’s DNB sensor, this suite enables us to better monitor both the magnitude and signature of nighttime phenomena, and anthropogenic sources of light emissions. This suite includes two daily products, one monthly and one yearly composite product. The first daily product offers top-of-atmosphere (TOA), at-sensor nighttime radiance at 15 arc-second resolution (approximately 500 meters at the equator). The second daily product provides a daily Nighttime Lights (NTL) product, also at 15 arc-second resolution, that is corrected for lunar bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), atmospheric, thermal, terrain, and straylight contamination. The monthly and yearly composites are generated from the daily atmospherically- and lunar-BRDF-corrected NTL radiances to remove extraneous artifacts and biases, including the influence of viewing angular effects on artificial lights.

The v2.0 release includes the daily TOA at-sensor nighttime radiance products and daily moonlight-adjusted NTL products from both SNPP VIIRS and JPSS1/NOAA-20 (J1/N20) VIIRS sources. The v2.0 record’s start-date begins from January 19, 2012, to the present for SNPP VIIRS and from January 5, 2018, to the present for J1/N20 VIIRS. The monthly and yearly v2.0 composite collections are slated for release by late-spring 2025.

Product Information

• VIIRS Black Marble Product User Guide
• VIIRS Black Marble Nighttime Lights Product Suite ATBD

Product Details