Please join the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Research Associate Namrata Chatterjee presenting a virtual seminar titled VIIRS Nightlights Detection of Anchorages and Fishing Grounds Around the World at the Fall 2023 AGU Conference online on Thursday, January 25, 2024.

Since the 1970s, it has been established that fishing boats with strong lighting can be detected using nighttime visible low-light imaging data gathered by polar-orbiting meteorological sensors (Croft, 1979). Two such sensors equipped with low-light imaging capabilities are the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS), with data archived since 1992, and the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), flown since 2011, and having data repository with the Earth Observation Group (EOG) at the Colorado School of Mines.

In 2015, EOG developed the VIIRS boat detection (VBD) algorithm with support from NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) proving ground program and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Currently, the VBD data are generated in near real-time, and records are available from April 2012 onwards for Asia, and from 2017 onwards for the world. Besides the nightly product, the EOG has created monthly and annual summary grids, unveiling spatial patterns not easily discernible from single-night data. This article presents cumulative VBD images spanning anchorages and fishing grounds from the years 2012 to 2021.