Historical VIIRS Vessel Detection Dashboard
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Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is one of the key instruments onboard the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) spacecraft, which was successfully launched on October 28, 2011. The VIIRS nadir door was opened on November 21, 2011, which enables a new generation of operational moderate resolution-imaging capabilities following the legacy of the AVHRR on NOAA and MODIS on Terra and Aqua satellites. The VIIRS empowers operational environmental monitoring and numerical weather forecasting, with 22 imaging and radiometric bands covering wavelengths from 0.41 to 12.5 microns, providing the sensor data records for more than twenty environmental data records including clouds, sea surface temperature, ocean color, polar wind, vegetation fraction, aerosol, fire, snow and ice, vegetation, , and other applications. Results from the on-orbit verification in the postlaunch check-out and intensive calibration and validation have shown that VIIRS is performing very well.
Night Light Vessel Detections
This layer shows vessels at sea that satellites have detected by the light that they emit at night. This includes all vessels that emit a lot of light at night, The majority of lights detected at sea at night come from commercial fishing vessels. The satellite makes a single over-pass across the entire planet every night, detecting lights not obscured by clouds and designed to give at least one observation globally every day. Because the vessels are detected solely based on light emission, we can detect individual vessels and even entire fleets that are not broadcasting AIS and so are not represented in the AIS-based fishing activity layer. Lights from fixed offshore infrastructure and other non-vessel sources are excluded.
To construct this layer, the Raptor Geo-IoT platform ingests boat detections processed from low light imaging data collected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The boat detections are processed in near-real time by NOAA’s Earth Observation Group, located in Boulder, Colorado. The product, known as VIIRS Boat Detections, picks up the presence of vessels using lights to attract catch or to conduct operations at night. More than 85% of the detections are from vessels that lack AIS or Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) transponders. Due to the orbit design of polar orbiting satellites, places closer to polar will have more over-passes per day, while equatorial regions have only one daily. Read more about this product, and download the data here: https://payneinstitute.mines.edu/eog/
Southern Anomaly Zone:
South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is an area where the Earth's inner Van Allen radiation belt is at its lowest altitude, allowing more energetic particles from space to penetrate. When such particle hit the sensors on board of satellite, it creates a false signal which might cause the VBD algorithm to recognize it as a boat detection. A filtration algorithm has been implemented but more needs to be done to lower the possibility of mis-identification.
(see the VIIRS FAQ & https://globalfishingwatch.org/ for more)