Global Earth Day/Night Images — GMT 6.1.0 documentation

# Global Earth Day/Night Images

We serve two NASA image products: The Blue and Black marble mosaics. We have filtered and downsampled those as well at the same resolutions that are available for the Earth DEMs. However, all images are pixel-registered only. These images may be plotted with grdimage or grdview and manipulated by grdmix. The above example mixes both images according to a day-night mask and adds illumination from a corresponding Earth DEM.

## Usage

We have processed and reformatted this publicly available global imagery and standardized their file names. In GMT, you may access a global daytime image by specifying the special names

> @earth_day_rru

Similarly for the nighttime view:

> @earth_night_rru

Here, rr is a 2-digit integer specifying the image resolution in the unit u, where u is either d, m or s for arc degree, arc minute or arc second, respectively. Note there is no file extension specified. The following codes for rru are supported:

Code | Dimensions | Size | Description
--- | --- | --- | ---
01d | 360 x 180 | 128 KB | 1 arc degree image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 111 km)
30m | 720 x 360 | 435 KB | 30 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 55 km)
20m | 1080 x 540 | 918 KB | 20 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 37 km)
15m | 1440 x 720 | 1.6 MB | 15 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 28 km)
10m | 2160 x 1080 | 3.4 MB | 10 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 18 km)
06m | 3600 x 1800 | 8.8 MB | 6 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 10 km)
05m | 4320 x 2160 | 13 MB | 5 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 9 km)
04m | 5400 x 2700 | 19 MB | 4 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 7.5 km)
03m | 7200 x 3600 | 33 MB | 3 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 5.6 km)
02m | 10800 x 5400 | 71 MB | 2 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 3.7 km)
01m | 21600 x 10800 | 258 MB | 1 arc minute image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic @ 1.9 km)
30s | 43200 x 21600 | 935 MB | 30 arc second image view (Blue|Black Marble mosaic original)

All of these images will, when downloaded, be placed in your ~/.gmt/server director under the `earth/earth_day` and `earth/earth_night` sub-directories.

## Technical Information

The 01m and lower resolution images are derivatives of NASA’s Blue and Black marble image mosaics. We have downsampled them via Cartesian Gaussian filtering to prevent aliasing while preserving the latitude-dependent resolution in the original images. The full (6 sigma) filter-widths are indicated in parenthesis. The dimensions above reflect the number of nodes covered by the global images and the sizes refer to the geotiff files on the remote server. Note: This data set is experimental and the format and delivery is likely to change in the future (e.g., via image tiles). To make the files as small as possible we have also downgraded them from 24-bit to 8-bit indexed images.

## Data and Cache Updates

Remote datasets and remote cache files are updated from time to time as it is our aim to provide only the very latest version of the data. This means we (a) do not support multiple versions of a dataset (you must obtain earlier versions of any published data sets elsewhere), (b) as GMT detects a new version on the server it will download it the next time you access the remote data set and it will overwrite any previous version, and (c) any data set or file we deem obsolete will be removed from the server, and hence it will also be removed from your .gmt server and cache folders when the syncing occurs. This is particularly true of the cache files that may come and go. If there are any cache files there that are important to you then we recommend you place a copy of them in another folder. Syncing occurs at most once a day and only when you actively use GMT.

## Data References

1. Blue Marble [https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57752/blue-marble-land-surface-shallow-water-and-shaded-topography].

2. Black Marble: [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/NightLights/page3.php].