The lights data have been overlaid on a base map built from Landsat 9 near-infrared observations (band 5) that helps distinguish the built environment from the natural. Ranjay Shrestha (NASA GSFC) and the Black Marble team selected the best cloud-free nights in each month, then processed and analyzed the VIIRS data to produce composites of nighttime lights. The maps at the top of this page show nighttime lights around Kyiv, Ukraine, for the entire months of March and May 2022. We have worked with organizations like the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre to help assess where displaced persons are most likely to have fled from and to track their return home.” “Black Marble is also special as a way of tracking recovery from conflict because lights generally follow people. “In the longer term, scientists use this data to understand how conflict has impacted development outcomes and the economy,” Stokes added. “In the short term, the data are useful for humanitarian relief agencies because they provide estimates of where and how many people have lost access to basic services, which exacerbates the loss of life.” These data show us one dimension of how the impacts of the conflict have been distributed within Ukraine,” said Eleanor Stokes, a USRA scientist and co-leader of the Black Marble Project. “It is generally hard to get data about conflict areas, which makes satellite imagery quite powerful. This sensing capability makes it possible to distinguish the intensity of lights on Earth’s surface and how they change. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi-NPP satellite measures nighttime light emissions and reflections via its day-night band. After a significant reduction of lights in March, power has slowly been restored and regular human activity has appeared to pick up in several parts of the country, particularly around the capital. Using the nighttime sensing capabilities of instruments on NOAA–NASA satellites, scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have observed the changes in light usage around Ukraine since January 2022.

Earth at night nasa