Evaluation of Lunar BRDF Correction for the Retrieval of Daily Viirs Black Marble Nighttime Lights

Satellite-derived Nighttime Lights (NTL) products are widely used to improve decision making across important issues, e.g., urban development, energy access, and disaster response. Moonlight is one of the dominant sources of measurement error for daily NTL time series analysis since the reflected lunar radiance is comparative to the objective human settlement signal. NASA's Black Marble NTL product suite (VNP46) relies on lunar irradiance and bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) modeling to account for these effects. In this study, we evaluated the accuracy of the Day/Night Band (DNB) surface BRDF and the corresponding lunar correction in the final (Level 3 Gridded) Black Marble products. The results indicate that the VIIRS DNB BRDF matches well with field high spatial resolution measurements, enabling near-real-time retrievals of daily NTL values.