The Defense Meteorological Program (DMSP) Operational Line-Scan System (OLS) has a unique capability to detect visible and near-infrared (VNIR) emission sources at night. Version 4 of the DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series consists of cloud-free composites made using all the available archived DMSP-OLS smooth resolution data for calendar years. In cases where two satellites were collecting data, two composites were produced. Image and data processing by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center. DMSP data collected by US Air Force Weather Agency.

Annual global VIIRS nighttime lights dataset is a time series produced from monthly cloud-free average radiance grids spanning 2013 to 2021. Data for 2022 are available in the NOAA/VIIRS/DNB/ANNUAL_V22 dataset. An initial filtering step removed sunlit, moonlit and cloudy pixels, leading to rough composites that contains lights, fires, aurora and background. The rough annual composites are made on monthly increments and then combined to form rough annual composites. The subsequent steps uses the twelve-month median radiance to discard high and low radiance outliers, filtering out most fires and isolating the background. Background areas are zeroed out using the data range (DR) calculated from 3x3 grid cells. The DR threshold for background is indexed to cloud-cover levels, with higher DR thresholds in areas having low numbers of cloud-free coverages. Note: 2012 data are not yet included because of differences in processing. (A) 201204-201212, and (B) 201204-201303. Only set (B) has masked median and average bands which doesn't follow the pattern there in other year datasets.

Monthly average radiance composite images using nighttime data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB). As these data are composited monthly, there are many areas of the globe where it is impossible to get good quality data coverage for that month. This can be due to …

aEstimated from Figure 1 in [39];bEstimated by [13].Table shows the maximum numbers of grounded fledglings in one year (the year is in brackets), the percentage of affected birds following [14], the percentage of dead birds rescued, the maximum light pollution level on the island according to a cloud-free composite of VIIRS nighttime lights corresponding to April and October of 2012 (Earth Observation Group, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center; available at http://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/viirs/download_monthly.html) and the maximum altitude. It is not an exhaustive list.Comparison of the rescue campaigns worldwide.