The “Black Marble”: City Lights At Night
Suomi NPP VIIRS Day/Night Band composite (global view)
On 05 December 2012 NASA and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) jointly released a “Black Marble” global composite of night-time Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.7 µm Day/Night Band imagery (collected from multiple cloud-free satellite overpasses in April and October 2012) — the image above shows this dataset visualized using the SSEC Web Map Server. See the NASA news story and the SSEC news story for additional details.
Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.7 µm Day/Night Band composite image (North America)
A closer view of North America is shown above, with a zoomed-in image centered on Madison, Wisconsin shown below.
Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.7 µm Day/Night Band composite image (centered on Madison, WI)
Many examples of the VIIRS Day/Night Band showing a variety of phenomena can be found elsewhere on the CIMSS Satellite Blog.