The Earth Observations Group (EOG) at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) is producing a version 1 suite of average radiance composite images using nighttime data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB).
Prior to averaging, the DNB data is filtered to exclude data impacted by stray light, lightning, lunar illumination, and cloud-cover. Cloud-cover is determined using the VIIRS Cloud Mask product (VCM). In addition, data near the edges of the swath are not included in the composites (aggregation zones 29-32).
Temporal averaging is done on a monthly and annual basis. The version 1 series of monthly composites has not been filtered to screen out lights from aurora, fires, boats, and other temporal lights. However, the annual composites have layers with additional separation, removing temporal lights and background (non-light) values.
The version 1 products span the globe from 75N latitude to 65S. The products are produced in 15 arc-second geographic grids and are made available in geotiff format as a set of 6 tiles. The tiles are cut at the equator and each span 120 degrees of latitude. Each tile is actually a set of images containing average radiance values and numbers of available observations.
The dataset is the night light annual composite in year of 2015. The dataset is a KML file which requires the Google earth to visualize. For other monthly and annual basis night light geotiff datasets (up to Sep 2017), please download at https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/viirs/download_dnb_composites.html#NTL_2015
Citation: the Earth Observation Group, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center
