29 MB - JPEG
Satellite images of Earth at night—often referred to as “night lights”—have been a curiosity for the public and a tool of fundamental research for at least 25 years. They have provided a broad, beautiful picture, showing how humans have shaped the planet and lit up the darkness. Produced every decade or so, such maps have spawned hundreds of pop-culture uses and dozens of economic, social science, and environmental research projects.
These images show Earth’s night lights as observed in 2016. The data were reprocessed with new compositing techniques that select the best cloud-free nights in each month over each land mass.
The images are available as JPEG and GeoTIFF, in three different resolutions: 0.1 degrees (3600x1800), 3km (13500x6750), and 500m (86400x43200). The 500m global map is divided into tiles (21600x21600) according to a gridding scheme.
Read more about these data and the processing used to produce the imagery:
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA GSFC.
Published May 16, 2019
Data acquired 2016