Accessing VIIRS Imagery on the Internet

The VIIRS Imagery Viewer hosts 7 days worth of imagery over North America — refreshed daily — for all 22 VIIRS channels. Five of these channels are high-resolution image bands called I-Bands, and sixteen are moderate-resolution bands or M-Bands. The viewer also hosts the Day Night Band (DNB) images. One advanatge of the the VIIRS Imagery Viewer is that it hosts full overpass images so coverage extends much further north, enabling unique and often spectacular views of the Aurora Borealis. The VIIRS Imagery Viewer has a simple navigation bar to explore VIIRS images and data products.

Along with individual bands, this site features multiple Level-2 products. The most popular are True and False Color images. VIIRS True Color imagery is a combination of M-Bands 3, 4 and 5 (Blue (0.48 µm), Green (0.55 µm) and Red (0.67 µm)) and are absolutely stunning. False Color combines M-Bands 11 and 12 with I-Band 1. Below are 3 images from September 9, 2021. I-Band 01 is on the left, a high resolution image with no color. The middle image is the same scene in True Color and the image on the right is a False Color image from the same overpass. Can you see the wildfire smoke in each of these images?