Add Radiance GeoJSON light pollution dataset under EarthScience

[imigueldiaz]

Adding comprehensive global nighttime light pollution dataset.

Dataset: https://archive.org/details/radiance-geojson-data-2025
Repository: https://codeberg.org/imigueldiaz/radiance-geojson

• 176 countries with radiance, MPSAS, and Bortle scale values
• 0.5 km sampling resolution
• ~2.8 GB total (compressed JSON format)
• Permanently hosted on Internet Archive
• License: CC-BY 4.0 (VIIRS data) + MIT (code)

Use cases: astronomy, dark sky research, urban planning, environmental studies

[ppival]

Thanks, @imigueldiaz but the new file (core/EarthScience/Radiance-GeoJSON-Light-Pollution.yml) in this PR has 38-Cloud metadata, which already exists elsewhere in the repository. To correctly add the Radiance GeoJSON light pollution dataset as described in your PR, please replace the contents of that file with the following metadata:

---

title: Radiance GeoJSON — Global Light Pollution
homepage: https://archive.org/details/radiance-geojson-data-2025
category: EarthScience
description: Global nighttime light pollution dataset provided as GeoJSON. Contains VIIRS-derived radiance values plus derived MPSAS and Bortle-scale estimates for ~176 countries, sampled at ~0.5 km resolution. Permanently hosted on Internet Archive; suitable for astronomy, dark-sky research, urban planning, and environmental studies.
version: 1.0
keywords: night-time lights, light pollution, radiance, VIIRS, MPSAS, Bortle, GeoJSON, global, sampling 0.5km
image:
temporal: 2025
spatial: Global; ~0.5 km sampling resolution
access_level: public
copyrights:
accrual_periodicity:
specification: GeoJSON (compressed JSON distribution; feature collections / newline-delimited GeoJSON)
data_quality: true
data_dictionary: Included with the dataset and repository (see references)
language: en
license:

• name: CC BY 4.0 (VIIRS-derived data)
  url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• name: MIT (code)
  url: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
  publisher:
• name: Internet Archive
  web: https://archive.org
  organization:
• name: Radiance GeoJSON (project repository)
  web: https://codeberg.org/imigueldiaz/radiance-geojson
  issued_time: 2025
  sources:
• name: VIIRS nighttime radiance (original source data used)
  web: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/
  access_url: https://archive.org/details/radiance-geojson-data-2025
  references:
• title: Radiance GeoJSON dataset (Internet Archive)
  reference: https://archive.org/details/radiance-geojson-data-2025
• title: Radiance GeoJSON project repository
  reference: https://codeberg.org/imigueldiaz/radiance-geojson

---

[imigueldiaz]

@ppival Thanks for catching that error! I've corrected the file with the proper Radiance GeoJSON metadata. Apologies for the confusion with the 38-Cloud data.

Note: While testing locally, I noticed that core/Climate+Weather/Washington Post Climate Change.yml fails validation with the current tests/validate.py script due to an encoding issue. The file contains UTF-8 characters (smart quotes: ' U+2019 and — U+2014) but the validation script opens files without specifying encoding='utf-8', causing a UnicodeDecodeError on Windows systems.

Error details:

• File: core/Climate+Weather/Washington Post Climate Change.yml
• Issue: Contains UTF-8 characters at positions 287-289 (') and 615-617 (—)
• Error: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 1591: character maps to <undefined>
• Fix needed: Line 31 in tests/validate.py should use open(entry, encoding='utf-8') instead of open(entry)

The file validates correctly when opened with UTF-8 encoding. Just wanted to bring this to your attention in case you'd like to address it.

[ppival]

Thanks @imigueldiaz and for the note on the validation issue - I'm going to post that under Issues and tag @caesar0301