Census from Heaven: An estimate of the global human population using night-time satellite imagery

Abstract

Night-time satellite imagery provided by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP OLS) is evaluated as a means of estimating the population of all the cities of the world based on their areal extent in the image. A global night-time image product was registered to a dataset of 2000 known city locations with known populations. A relationship between areal extent and city population discovered by Tobler and Nordbeck is identified on a nation by nation basis to estimate the population of the 22 920 urban clusters that exist in the night-time satellite image. The relationship between city population and city areal extent was derived from 1597 city point locations with known population that landed in a 'lit' area of the image. Due to conurbation, these 1597 cities resulted in only 1383 points of analysis for performing regression. When several cities fell into one 'lit' area their populations were summed. The results of this analysis allow for an estimate of the urban population of every nation of the world. By using the known percent of population in urban areas for every nation a total national population was also estimated. The sum of these estimates is a total estimate of the global human population, which in this case was 6.3 billion. This is fairly close to the generally accepted contemporaneous (1997) estimate of the global population which stood at approximately 5.9 billion.