Statistical Moments of VIIRS Nighttime Lights

Payne Institute Earth Observation Group Director Christopher D. Elvidge, Feng Chi Hsu, Mikhail Zhizhin, Tilottama Ghosh, and Tamara Sparks write about how they generated VIIRS day/night band multiyear and annual statistical moments for a widely dispersed set of test areas. The moments were calculated from 15 arc second nightly temporal profiles spanning 2012-2020, filtered to exclude cloudy and sunlit data, with radiance adjustments to reduce view angle and lunar illuminance effects. The moment data were examined in two ways: 1) Geospatial grids-which reveal zonation and temporal changes present in urban areas, and 2) Scattergrams of moment pairs.  December 16, 2022.