VIIRS Day Night Band and alternatives for night satellite images

Question

Has anyone worked with VIIRS Day Night Band? I want to download few images to get a map of night scene of Central Europe (city lights etc). I use friendly interface at NOAA (http://www.class.ncdc.noaa.gov/saa/products/search?datatype_family=VIIRS) and I've downloaded few images already. The problem is that there was only one nice image and the rest of them were in 95% covered with value 0 (although they were taken in the same night!).

My questions are: Is there any way to preview VIIRS Day Night Band images before download? Does mosaic of night scene images for Europe already exist and is available for download? Do you have any other ideas where to find remotely sensed images of earth at night?

Thanks for any advices!

Cheers! Rok Ciglič

Answer 1

I've got some help from NOAA. If someone needs an info about VIIRS images download: The best way to preview images is to preview Meteosat geostationary browse imagery. The 0000Z time IR images would be sufficient. This is aa website for previewing images: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/gibbs/year . You can also visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html and downloiad the high resolution map of the globe.

The first link helped me to check if night on certain datum had a lot of clouds. So I was able to avouid downloading bad images. cheers! Rok