A history reconstructed time series (1992-2011) of annual global NPP-VIIRS-like nighttime light data through a Super-resolution U-Net model

The dataset is an extend time series of the Version 2 annual NPP-VIIRS nighttime light composites. Based on the super-resolution deep learning technology, the dataset using DMSP-OLS NTL data and Landsat NDVI to reconstruct the NPP-VIIRS NTL data in the early years (1992-2011). The dataset could be easily updated by downloading the version 2 annual NPP-VIIRS NTL data in later years from the academic sector at the Colorado School of Mines (https://eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnl/). The dataset has good spatial pattern and temporal consistency, and is highly consistent with NPP-VIIRS NTL data. It provide a longer time period compared to existing products. Compared with the annual NPP-VIIRS NTL data in 2012, the dataset shows a good consistency at the pixel, city, province and nation levels with R2 of 0.617, 0.747, 0.874, and 0.964, respectively, while the R2 of the NPP-VIIRS-like NTL product provide by Chen (2020) is 0.512, 0.694, 0.86, and 0.966, respectively. The dataset contains (1) simulated NPP-VIIRS NTL time series from the DMSP-OLS NTL data (1992-2011) based on a U-Net based super resolution method; and (2) the version 2 annual NPP-VIIRS NTL data (2012-2020), which were obtained from the academic sector at the Colorado School of Mines (https://eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnl/). The pixels of which value less than zero were set to zero. The dataset are 15 arc second grids, spanning -180 to 180 degrees longitude and -65 to 75 degrees latitude. Each zip file contains an NTL image in geotiff format. The filename of each image is "SRUNet_NPP_VIIRS_V2_Like_yyyy", where "yyyy" is the year of the image. The simulated NPP-VIIRS NTL data converted from the DMSP-OLS NTL data in 2012 and 2013 are also uploaded, which named "simulated_NPP_VIIRS_V2_yyyy".