Europe at Night During the November 2022 Blackout
About This Chart
Data Visualization Method
- Data: Daily nighttime radiance from NASA's Black Marble VNP46A2 (Version 2), derived from the Suomi NPP satellite's Day-Night Band. Values are observed radiance in nW/cm²/sr, not a measure of electricity or population.
- Date: A single night, 24 November 2022, the day after a large-scale strike on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and the widespread outages that followed.
- Area: A wide European frame from the British Isles east to western Russia, so Ukraine is read alongside its neighbours rather than in isolation.
- Processing: Roughly 500 m source pixels are quality-filtered, aggregated to a common 5 km grid using the 90th percentile of clean observations, and kept only above 0.3 nW/cm²/sr. Where a single night left gaps from cloud or missing data, a limited gap-fill drew on the nearest high-quality retrieval within two days, without overwriting same-night values.
- Chart form: An animated point map. Each point is a grid cell placed by latitude and longitude, with brightness encoded by colour and size. The gentle twinkling is a visual aid for locating bright points, not a record of light flickering in real time.
Creator's Note
The recurring question behind this archive is how to make the change of a city, a country, or a whole region visible on one readable surface. An earlier approach used population density; for a night defined by lost light, direct satellite radiance turned out to be the closer instrument, because it records the light itself rather than a proxy for it.
What the map shows is a pattern, not a verdict. Across Ukraine the night reads dimmer than the lit fabric of its neighbours, and that contrast is the point worth sitting with rather than a number to rank. A later chart will combine population and urban density into a night-lights-style point map, reading the same terrain from the other direction.
Data Sources
- NASA Black Marble (VNP46A2, Suomi NPP/VIIRS) — daily nighttime radiance, the sole measured layer in this map.
- Natural Earth — land and country boundaries used to keep coastal light and remove open-sea points.
Limitations
This is a single night of observation. Even a moonlight- and atmosphere-corrected product does not fully remove the effects of weather, snow, viewing angle, or residual sensor differences, so parts of the frame can read dark for reasons that have nothing to do with the ground.
The radiance shown is the 90th percentile within each 5 km cell, capped by a shared brightness scale and a fixed threshold. It is a shaped, readable version of the raw signal, not a total light budget, and the brightest points can include gas flares, industrial sites, or fires rather than city lighting alone.
Where cloud or missing data left holes, a limited two-day gap-fill was used, and inside Ukraine that fill was blocked from restoring outage areas with brighter values from nearby dates. The count of points is a visualization budget, not a census of lit places.
What This Chart Doesn't Show
A dark or empty area is not evidence of "no electricity." Lower nighttime radiance can reflect outages, deliberate lighting restrictions and blackout controls, people leaving, changed industrial activity, or simply the weather on that night — usually several of these at once, which the map cannot separate.
The map measures light, so it says nothing about how much of the grid was lost or how much was physically damaged. It is one night seen from orbit under real observing conditions, and the date is this project's chosen point in time, not an official NASA designation of the blackout.