Annual Time Series of Global VIIRS Nighttime Lights Derived from Monthly Averages 2012 to 2019

Payne Institute Earth Observation Group researchers Director Christopher Elvidge, Mikhail Zhizhin, Tilottama Ghosh, Feng-Chi Hsu, and Jay Taneja have released their new research – a consistently processed annual global nighttime lights time series (2012–2019) that was produced using monthly cloud-free radiance averages made from low light imaging day/night band (DNB) data collected by the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The processing steps are modified from the original methods developed to produce annual nighttime lights products from nightly data. Only two years of VIIRS nighttime lights (VNL) were produced with the V.1 methods: 2015 and 2016. Here they report on methods used to produce a V.2 VNL time series from the monthly averages with filtering to remove extraneous features such as biomass burning, aurora, and background.  March 2, 2021.