VIIRS-Nightlights-Extraction

Code to download and extract the monthly world composites VIIRs nighlights dataset found at the Earth Observation Group

In order to download from the EOG website you need an account is which can be created here.

The scripts should be run in the following order:

1. EOG_scrape.py (no authentication needed), which compiles an up-to-date list of the monthly composites.
2. get_token.sh EOG_USERNAME EOG_PASSWORD (substituting your username and password as the commandline arguments), which generates an OAuth token (valid for 24 hours) to download from the server
3. download_viirs.sh which will prompt you to download either the full dataset or a sample.

Finally, I've included an example of how the rasters can be extracted into a datafile which can be used in the research context using R.

The rasters are large, ending up at around ~11gb each, a year's worth of nightlights is roughly 130gb, and the full dataset comes it at around 1.1 Tb as of September of 2021.