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Ukraine at Night Since the Invasion
Mean night-time light over Ukraine (including Crimea), nW/cm²/sr, monthly
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
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Source: NASA Black Marble VNP46A3 (LAADS DAAC), monthly moonlight- and atmosphere-corrected night-time radiance from VIIRS on Suomi NPP. Palanor calculation: the area-weighted mean over each place's land, built by NASA from clear, snow-free nights, with pixels that had none filled with their latest good value; only light at or above 2 nW/cm²/sr counts, which leaves out a faint background glow in recent years. Boundaries: Natural Earth. Russia's strikes on Ukraine's power system began on 10 October 2022. Months when snow or cloud hid more than half of the country are left out.
Ukraine's lights from space before and through the war: the collapse after the February 2022 invasion and the dark winters of strikes on the power grid, with Poland as a neighbour for comparison.
What this chart reads
- Night Lights: Ukraine (NASA Black Marble, monthly)as “Ukraine”latest 2026-09-01
- Night Lights: Poland (NASA Black Marble, monthly)as “Poland”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
Night Lights: Ukraine (NASA Black Marble, monthly). Source: NASA Black Marble VNP46A3, collection 2 (VIIRS/NPP Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Monthly L3 Global 15 arc-second, doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VNP46A3.002), from NASA's LAADS DAAC. NASA Earth science data have no restrictions on use or redistribution (CC0). Boundaries: Natural Earth 10m (public domain). Palanor calculation; NASA does not endorse it. Refreshed from a GitHub Actions job that reads only the radiance, quality and land layers and stores no imagery.
Night Lights: Poland (NASA Black Marble, monthly). Source: NASA Black Marble VNP46A3, collection 2 (VIIRS/NPP Lunar BRDF-Adjusted Nighttime Lights Monthly L3 Global 15 arc-second, doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VNP46A3.002), from NASA's LAADS DAAC. NASA Earth science data have no restrictions on use or redistribution (CC0). Boundaries: Natural Earth 10m (public domain). Palanor calculation; NASA does not endorse it. Refreshed from a GitHub Actions job that reads only the radiance, quality and land layers and stores no imagery.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.