Located in Postdam (Germany), the GFZ is the German Research Centre for Geosciences. GFZ assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to datasets. These datasets are archived by and published through GFZ Data Services and cover all geoscientific disciplines. They range from large dynamic datasets deriving from data intensive global monitoring networks with real-time data acquisition to the full suite of highly variable datasets collected by individual researchers or small teams. These highly variable data (‘long-tail data’) are small in size, but represent an important part of the total scientific output.

GFZ uses the European Union Public Licence (EUPL-1.2) for releasing Radiance Light Trends, a GIS (Geographical Information System) web application that is designed to quickly display information about radiance trends at a specific location (available online at https://lighttrends.lightpollutionmap.info). It uses data from two satellite systems, DMSP-OLS and VIIRS DNB, with data processing by NOAA. New VIIRS layers are added automatically as soon as NOAA makes them available to public.

The web application allows the user to examine changes in nighttime light emissions (nearly) worldwide, from 1992 up until last month. From 1992 to 2013, data comes from the Operational Linescan System of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites. From 2012 to the present, data comes from the Day/Night Band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument (VIIRS DNB). Due to significant differences in the instruments (as described by Miller et al., 2013), it is not possible to have a single record running from 1992 to today. A description of the VIIRS DNB night lights product used in this application was published by Elvidge et al. (2017), the data used in the app can be accessed from the NOAA Earth Observation Group (EOG) Website: https://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/download.html

More information:

http://dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/about.html

http://dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de/panmetaworks/showshort.php?id=escidoc:3974889