A Novel Modeling Framework and Data Product for Extended VIIRS-like Artificial Nighttime Light Image Reconstruction (1986-2024)

Artificial Night-Time Light (NTL) remote sensing is a vital proxy for quantifying the intensity and spatial distribution of human activities. Although the NPP-VIIRS sensor provides high-quality NTL observations, its temporal coverage, which begins in 2012, restricts long-term time-series studies that extend to earlier periods. Despite the progress in extending VIIRS-like NTL time-series, current methods still suffer from two significant shortcomings: the underestimation of light intensity and the structural omission. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel reconstruction framework consisting of a two-stage process: construction and refinement. The construction stage features a Hierarchical Fusion Decoder (HFD) designed to enhance the fidelity of the initial reconstruction. The refinement stage employs a Dual Feature Refiner (DFR), which leverages high-resolution impervious surface masks to guide and enhance fine-grained structural details. Based on this framework, we developed the Extended VIIRS-like Artificial Nighttime Light (EVAL) product for China, extending the standard data record backwards by 26 years to begin in 1986. Quantitative evaluation shows that EVAL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art products, boosting the $\text{R}^2$ from 0.68 to 0.80 while lowering the RMSE from 1.27 to 0.99. Furthermore, EVAL exhibits excellent temporal consistency and maintains a high correlation with socioeconomic parameters, confirming its reliability for long-term analysis. The resulting EVAL dataset provides a valuable new resource for the research community and is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.11888/HumanNat.tpdc.302930.