VIIRS night-time lights

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) collects global low-light imaging data that have significant improvements over comparable data collected for 40 years by the DMSP Operational Linescan System. One of the prominent features of DNB data is the detection of electric lighting present on the Earth’s surface. Most of these lights are from human settlements. VIIRS collects source data that could be used to generate monthly and annual science grade global radiance maps of human settlements with electric lighting. There are a substantial number of steps involved in producing a product that has been cleaned to exclude background noise, solar and lunar contamination, data degraded by cloud cover, and features unrelated to electric lighting (e.g. fires, flares, volcanoes). This article describes the algorithms developed for the production of high-quality global VIIRS night-time lights. There is a broad base of science users for VIIRS night-time lights products, ranging from land-use scientists, urban geographers, ecologists, carbon modellers, astronomers, demographers, economists, and social scientists.