Abstract
Two types of nighttime light products were derived from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS). One called stable nighttime light (NTL) is saturated in urban centers, and the other called radiance calibrated NTL (RCNTL) does not have saturation. This study compared these two types of images from three perspectives. For the radiometric attributes, these two types of images were fitted well by both the power function and the logarithmic function in the whole of China with the lowest R 2 value of 0.867 and the highest of 0.937, and the power function fitting performed better. In addition, the complex many-to-many relationship between these two types of images was quantified by the coefficients of variation. For the spatial attributes, through wavelet decomposition, the RCNTL images provide more spatial details than the stable NTL images with the higher energy proportions of the detail component. For economic modeling capacity, the sum of RCNTL correlates better with gross regional product than the sum of stable NTL. Comparison results indicate that the RCNTL images correlate well with the stable NTL images, and these two images have different advantages in different aspects.
Highlights
Cao et al [22] simulated a set of nighttime light images by using the DMSP/OLS radiance calibrated nighttime light (RCNTL) images to study the impact of saturation on the intercalibration between the DMSP/OLS stable NTL images
The saturation effect in the stable NTL image, causing a single high stable NTL value to correspond to a lot of different RCNTL values, is shown in Fig. 10 in the form of the high coefficients of variation corresponding to high stable NTL values and the low coefficients of variation corresponding to high RCNTL values
The application of the stable NTL images is limited by the saturation effect [19]
Summary
THE stable nighttime light (NTL) images from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) have been widely used in various research fields, such as economics [1,2,3], energy consumption [4,5,6], population distribution and density [7,8,9], urbanization dynamics [10,11,12], environmental assessment [13,14,15] and important event evaluation [16, 17]. A study by Zhang et al [21] developed the Vegetation Adjusted NTL Urban Index (VANUI), which reduces the saturation effect and increases the variation of light in city centers. These methods cannot be used to produce a set of products without saturation. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released several radiance calibrated nighttime light (RCNTL) products without saturation. These products are useful in numerous application fields. The DMSP/OLS stable NTL image and the DMSP/OLS RCNTL image share many common application areas
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