Modeling the distribution of human population with night. Night time satellite imagery data this paper describes evorts at estimating the population of every country of the world using the stable night time lights dataset produced from hundreds of orbits from the dmsp ols elvidgeetal. Observations on nighttime lights serve as a unique proxy of human activity, and numerous studies have shown the relationship between nighttime lights data and economic activity doll et al. Night time lights the night time lights dataset used in this analysis is the world stable light dataset, which was produced using time series data from the defense meteorological satellite program dmsp operational linescan system ols for the period 1 october 1994 to 30 april 1995 elvidge et al.
Fuell 2, anita leroy 2, matthew smith 2, deirdre kann 3, david bernhardt 4, nezette rydell 5, and robert cox 6. Despite the great progress in the recent years, nighttime light remote sensing is still. Advances in using multitemporal nighttime lights satellite imagery to detect, estimate, and monitor socioeconomic dynamics article pdf available in remote sensing of environment 192. Ciesin thematic guide to nighttime light remote sensing. Remotely sensed data on artificial night time lights ntl have been shown to correlate with gross domestic product in developed countries. We tested two different multitemporal remote sensing datasets and techniques for. With this data, it is possible to detect clouds illuminated by moonlight, lights from cities and towns, industrial sites, gas flares, fires, lightning, and aurora.
Viirs daynight band quick guide by nasa sport why is. Due to the lacking of onboard calibration on ols, and the overglow of the lights resources, the information about the night lights cannot be extracted directly. May 01, 2000 night time satellite imagery acquired between october 1994 and march 1995 is here exploited to derive economic and energyrelated global maps. The objective of this study is to model the light pollution spatial pattern, and monitor changes in trends of spatial distribution from 1992 to 2012 in china using nighttime light imagery from the defense meteorological satellite program operational linescan system. We explore the trend in nighttime lights for the longterm conflict in and around chechnya in the north caucasus of russia and the short, but intense, war. Population density, 1990 ciesin, 2000 night time lights. Dynamics and spatial distribution of global nighttime lights arxiv. The corrected nighttime radiance, resulting in a superior retrieval of nighttime lights at short time scales and a reduction in background noise, enables. He and xiaofeng li, reflecting the immense use of night light imagery by. Remote sensing of nighttime light is a relatively new. Before any process, the night lights images should be calibrated. The nighttime lights of the world data set was complied from defense meteorological satellite program dmsp data spanning october 1994 march 1995. Modeling the distribution of human population with nighttime satellite imagery and gridded population of the world pecora 15land satellite information ivisprs commission ifieos 2002 conference proceedings figure 1.
Fluctuations in anthropogenic nighttime lights from. Fluctuations in anthropogenic nighttime lights from satellite imagery for five cities in niger and nigeria. A global, long term look at links to socioeconomic trends jeremy proville1, daniel zavalaaraiza2, gernot wagner3 1 office of economic policy and analysis, environmental defense fund, new york, new york, united states of america, 2 climate and energy program, environmental defense fund, austin, texas, united states of. There is a broad base of science users for viirs night time lights products. Remote sensing of nighttime light request pdf researchgate. For each tile, we extract vector representations from the top layer of the model, before the softmax classi. More recent research demonstrates that multitemporal ntl data can serve as a reliable proxy for change over time in these variables whether they are. Using the same dataset and procedures, imhoff et al. Apr 29, 2017 this map shows where earths nighttime lights have increased in blue and dimmed in pink between 2012 and 2016 based on data from nasas suominpp satellite. Night time lights datasets noaangdc paleblu data portal.
National oceanographic and atmospheric administration noaa. This particular visualization shows only the lights generated from electricity. When the top two quintiles are excluded from their sample, restricting the sample to those below twice the international poverty line, the r2 falls precipitously, to about 0. Request pdf the use of nighttime lights satellite imagery as a measure of australias regional electricity consumption and population distribution satellite imagery of nighttime lights. Despite the great progress in the recent years, nighttime light remote sensing is still in a primary stage of development. Advances in using multitemporal night time lights satellite imagery to detect, estimate, and monitor socioeconomic dynamics. The observations on which the data is assembled are made by the operational linescan system ols flown on the defense meteorological satellite program dmsp satellites. Analogous to how visible imagery uses reflected sunlight, the dnb. Firstly, night time light data is a available at a very coarse geospatial resolution only.
Mapping urban transitions using multitemporal landsat and. The oceans are shaded a very dark blue and the land is shaded a slightly lighter blue so that they can be distinguished. Applications of satellite remote sensing of nighttime light. By analyzing the location, frequency, and appearance of lights observed in an image times series, it is possible to distinguish four primary types of lights present at the earths surface. Meanwhile, growing awareness of adverse impacts of. Nighttime satellite imagery acquired between october 1994 and march 1995 is here exploited to derive economic and energyrelated global maps. This extensively illustrated guide introduces users to the types of. In night, elie wiesel uses imagery to describe the horrors of the holocaust and allows the reader to comprehend the.
The last global composite of the earths night lights was created in 2003. Janpeter muller, chris doll university college london chris. In addition to moonlit clouds, the ols also detects lights from human settlements, fires, gas flares, heavily lit fishing boats, lightning and the aurora. The use of nighttime lights satellite imagery as a measure. The nasa black marble algorithm produces cloudfree imagery that has been corrected for atmospheric, terrain, lunar brdf, thermal, and straylight effects. In contrast, using nighttime lights, mohan and strobl 2017 are. Li and li 2014 have utilized time series dmspols nighttime light imagery to assess the syrian civil war, and their results show that the nighttime light loss from 2011 to 20 was 74 per cent. Modeling the distribution of human population with night time satellite imagery and gridded population of the world pecora 15land satellite information ivisprs commission ifieos 2002 conference proceedings figure 1. Analyzing spatial variability in nighttime lights using a. Inferring nighttime satellite imagery from human mobility. The global demography project, technical report tr956. Modeling the distribution of human population with nighttime. Since the late 1990s, remotely sensed nighttime lights ntl satellite imagery has been shown to correlate with socioeconomic parameters including urbanization, economic activity, and population. This threshold is often easily exceeded in very bright urban cores and does not allow the night time light data to capture any growth in the city center.
This study examines the validity of nighttime lights as a measure for rural electri. Nasas night time satellite images show huge growth of. Background nightsat data and applications there are two major sources of nighttime satellite imagery. Dec 09, 2011 ebener s, murray c, tandon a, elvidge cc. Dmsp night time light images were also used in regard to human population density relations. Using national household survey data, principal component analysis was used to compute assetbased poverty indices from aggregated household asset variables at the administrative 1 level n 338 in 37. Figure 1b, which indicates the boundary that separates urban areas from surrounding rural areas based on ntl images. This article analyses dmspols nighttime imagery as an information source to detect human settlements and to estimate the urban population in the amazon region. Dmspols nighttime light imagery for urban population. Existing measures of poverty based on income, consumption or assets are difficult to compare across geographic settings and are expensive. Generating the nighttime light of the human settlements by. What does high resolution satellite imagery reveal about economic welfare. Fuell2, anita leroy2, matthew smith2, deirdre kann3, david bernhardt4, nezette rydell5, and robert cox6 1nasa shortterm prediction research and transition sport ensco, inc. Nighttime lights of the human settlements hereafter, stable lights are seen as a valuable proxy of social economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions at the subnational level.
This global view of earths city lights is a composite assembled from data. An excellent detailed description of the satellite instrumentation. Jan 21, 2014 since the 1970s nighttime satellite images of the earth from space have provided a striking illustration of the extent of artificial light. We examine three key variables extracted from a preprocessed stable nighttime lights data set. Advances in using multitemporal nighttime lights satellite. Using nighttime satellite imagery to visualize emergy. The growing archives of imagery from various earthobserving satellites have stimulated the development of innovative methods for change detection in longterm time series. In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights.
Ciesin thematic guide to nighttime light remote sensing and. There is a broad base of science users for viirs nighttime lights products. Nasas night time satellite images show huge growth of indian cities. Researchers have found positive correlations across countries between night time lights data and several socioeconomic variables. A global inventory of urban corridors based on perceptions. The imagery we use is the defense meteorological satellite program s operational linescan system dmspols, which acquires night time images in the visible near infrared vnir. Nighttime light ntl imagery acquired by remote sensing technology intuitively exhibit the distributions of artificial nocturnal radiances, which is an increasingly. This satellite contains a lowlight sensor called the.
Moreover, the availability of highquality data remains limited. Jun 26, 2017 this article describes the algorithms developed for the production of highquality global viirs night time lights. The latest release of nighttime imagery has been greatly improved through the use of the suomi national polarorbiting partnership npp satellite which was launched in october of 2011. Nasa has released an update of its popular earth at night composite imagery. Nighttime light observations from remote sensing provide us with a. The older is the operational linescan system ols sys. Janpeter muller, chris doll university college london. Using remotely sensed nighttime light as a proxy for. But spending time gazing at the images presented in this book. Modelling the distribution of human population with nighttime lights imagery and gridded population of the world pecora 15land satellite information ivisprs commission ifieos conference proceedings. Studies using ntl data from dmspols and suomi npp viirs dnb are. This threshold is often easily exceeded in very bright urban cores and does not allow the night time light data to capture any growth in. This map shows where earths nighttime lights have increased in blue and dimmed in pink between 2012 and 2016 based on data from nasas suominpp.
The use of nighttime lights satellite imagery as a measure of australias regional electricity consumption and population distribution. Night time imagery provides an intuitively graspable view of our planet, says william stefanov. We construct several different measures of luminosity, vary. The dmsp ols system consists of a panchromatic visible and nearinfraredvnir band anda thermal band. Remote sensing of nighttime lights within urban areas. Doll1 abstract nighttime light imagery stands unique amongst remote sensing data sources as. In particular, nighttime lights are used as a proxy measure of nonrenewable empower. Doll1 abstract nighttime light imagery stands unique amongst remote sensing data sources as it offers a uniquely human view of the earths surface. This article analyses dmspols nighttime imagery as an information source to. Pdf advances in using multitemporal nighttime lights. Nighttime lights the nighttime lights dataset used in this analysis is the world stable light dataset, which was produced using time series data from the defense meteorological satellite program dmsp operational linescan system ols for the period 1 october 1994 to 30 april 1995 elvidge et al.
Simulation of representative nocturnal satellite imagery for urban areas with. By considering the lit area of a city, and combining this with ancillary statistical information, an analysis was performed designed to investigate the potential of nighttime imagery for quantitative estimation of global socioeconomic parameters. The field lacks a physical model to relate nightlight imagery and light generation. Linking socioeconomic factors to urban growth by using night. This article describes the algorithms developed for the production of highquality global viirs nighttime lights. The urban development is closed linked to the human society development. Night time light imagery stands unique amongst remote sensing data sources as it offers a uniquely human view of the earths surface. Nighttime light imagery stands unique amongst remote sensing data sources as it offers a uniquely human view of the earths surface. Linking socioeconomic factors to urban growth by using. A digital archive of the data is available starting with the year 1992.
Amaral 2003 considered that dmsp nighttime light imagery generated from a more representative time series would more precisely represent the urban population distribution. Ciesin thematic guide nighttime light remote sensing 3 1. Since the late 1990s, remotely sensed night time lights ntl satellite imagery has been shown to correlate with socioeconomic parameters including urbanization, economic activity, and population. Imagery is the use of sensory details to enhance description in literature. The newer viirsdnb nighttime light data is also better than dmspols data in. Detecting the effects of wars in the caucasus regions of. Pdf dmspols nighttime lights imagery and urban population. Using remotely sensed nighttime light as a proxy for poverty. Remote sensing of nighttime lights offers a unique ability to monitor. Remote sensing of night time lights within urban areas.
One of the most popular earth observation data sets among economists recently has been night time lights. Since the 1970s nighttime satellite images of the earth from space have provided a striking illustration of the extent of artificial light. We used nighttime lights data made available by the u. Population bias in nighttime lights imagery article pdf available in remote sensing letters 109. What is an example of imagery in night by elie wiesel. National geophysical data center of the us national oceanic and atmospheric administration. To assess the effectiveness of health interventions it is critical to monitor the spatial and temporal changes in the health indicators of populations and outcomes across varying levels of poverty. Nighttime satellite imagery data this paper describes evorts at estimating the population of every country of the world using the stable nighttime lights dataset produced from hundreds of orbits from the dmsp ols elvidgeetal. In this study, we propose an improved method to generate the stable lights from defense meteorological satellite programoperational linescan system dmspols daily nighttime light data for 1999. The use of nighttime lights satellite imagery as a. The urban transition that has emerged over the past quarter century poses new challenges for mapping land coverland use change lcluc. Modelling the distribution of human population with night time lights imagery and gridded population of the world pecora 15land satellite information ivisprs commission ifieos conference proceedings. Dmspols single orbits were used to generate a dmsp stable light mosaic for 2002, in.
Observations on night time lights serve as a unique proxy of human activity, and numerous studies have shown the relationship between night time lights data and economic activity doll et al. Secondly, night time light data is saturated at a certain threshold of light intensity. This article analyses dmspols night time imagery as an information source to detect human settlements and to estimate the urban population in the amazon region. By considering the lit area of a city, and combining this with ancillary statistical information, an analysis was performed designed to investigate the potential of night time imagery for quantitative estimation of global socioeconomic parameters. While this innovative use of daytime imagery substantially improves on the use of night time lights alone, it is not necessarily optimal for predicting poverty rates. Population density, 1990 ciesin, 2000 nighttime lights. The presence of lighting across the globe is almost entirely due to some form of human activity be it settlements, shipping fleets, gas flaring or fires associated with swidden agriculture. Explaining seasonal fluctuations of measles in niger using. Advances in using multitemporal nighttime lights satellite imagery to. Nightlights imagery by noaas earth observation group privacy policy.
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