Illuminating the Capabilities of the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band

By S. Miller, W. Straka, S. Mills, Christopher D. Elvidge, Thomas F. Lee, J. Solbrig, A. Walther, Andrew K. Heidinger, Stephanie C. Weiss. Remote Sensing, 2013

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Daytime measurements of reflected sunlight in the visible spectrum have been a staple of Earth-viewing radiometers since the advent of the environmental satellite platform. At night, these same optical-spectrum sensors have traditionally been limited to thermal infrared emission, which contains relatively poor information content for many important weather and climate parameters. These deficiencies have limited our ability to characterize the full diurnal behavior and processes of parameters relevant to improved monitoring, understanding and modeling of weather and climate processes. Visible-spectrum light information does exist during the nighttime hours, originating from a wide variety of sources, but its detection requires specialized technology. Such measurements have existed, in a limited way, on USA Department of Defense satellites, but the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, which carries a new Day/Night Band (DNB) radiometer, offers the first quantitative measurements of nocturnal visible and near-infrared light. Here, we demonstrate the expanded potential for nocturnal low-light visible applications enabled by the DNB. Via a combination of terrestrial and extraterrestrial light sources, such observations are always available—expanding many current existing applications while enabling entirely new capabilities. These novel low-light measurements open doors to a wealth of new interdisciplinary research topics while lighting a pathway toward the optimized design of follow-on satellite based low light visible sensors.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c86c6a9b85f0bada3f876fe3d5c201ea4abd6069

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Citations in the corpus

VIIRS night-time lights (2017, background): “…data, including a vast reduction in the pixel footprint (ground instantaneous field of view [GIFOV]), uniform GIFOV from nadir to edge of scan, lower detection limits, wider dynamic range, finer quantization, and in-flight calibration (Miller et al. 2012; Elvidge et al. 2013; Miller et al. 2013).”
Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives (2019, methodology): “Flown jointly by NASA and NOAA, VIIRS/DNB provides a substantial number of improvements over the DMSP-OLS, including a full in-flight calibration, a higher spatial resolution, a lower detection limit, a wider dynamic range, and a finer radiometric quantization compared to DMSP [27,37,39].”
Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent (2017, background): “This sensor provides the first-ever global calibrated nighttime radiancemeasurements in a spectral band of 500 to 900 nm, which is close to the visible band, with a much higher radiometric sensitivity than the DMSP, and at a spatial resolution of near 750m (15).”
Multisensor profiling of a concentric gravity wave event propagating from the troposphere to the ionosphere (2015, background): “The Day/Night Band (DNB) sensor onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite, launched in 2011 as part of the Visible/Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), provides satellite-based sensing of the nocturnal environment [Lee et al., 2006; Miller et al., 2013a, 2013b].”