Abstract
Images of the Earth at night are an exceptional source of human geographical data, because artificial light highlights human activity in a way that daytime scenes do not. The quality of such imagery dramatically improved in 2012 with two new spaceborne detectors. The higher resolution and precision of the data considerably expands the scope of possible applications. In this paper, we introduce the two new data sources and discuss their potential limitations using three case studies. Data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day-Night Band (VIIRS DNB) is shown to have sufficient resolution to identify major sources of waste light, such as airports, and we find considerable variation in the peak radiance of the world’s largest airports. Nighttime imagery brings “cultural footprints” to light: DNB data reveals that American cities emit many times more light per capita than German cities and that cities in the former East of Germany emit more light per capita than those in the former West. Photographs from the International Space Station, the second new source of imagery, provide some limited spectral information, as well as street-level resolution. These images may be of greater use for epidemiological studies than the lower resolution DNB data.
Highlights
Artificial light at night is one of the clearest indicators of human activity available via remote sensing.Images of the Earth at night are an extremely useful tool for research involving human communities and their interaction with the environment
Night light data have been used in the past to study economic variables [1,2], socio-economic properties [3,4,5], population [6,7] and population density [8], built area [9,10], power consumption [11], greenhouse gas emissions [12], gas flaring [13], atmospheric chemistry [14], skyglow [15,16,17], the epidemiology of illness related to light exposure [18], among other analyses [19]
Night imagery is likely to be extremely useful in fields as disparate as economics, ecology, epidemiology and atmospheric science
Summary
Artificial light at night is one of the clearest indicators of human activity available via remote sensing.Images of the Earth at night are an extremely useful tool for research involving human communities and their interaction with the environment. It has long been known that in regions with similar levels of development within a single country, the total upward light output of the city is strongly related to its population (e.g., [34]). While the VIIRS data are not able to resolve individual streets, large, brightly-lit structures, like airports and stadiums, are clearly visible These structures can be responsible for a significant fraction of the total light emitted upward by a city: in Berlin, Tegel airport is responsible for about 4% of the total uplight in the 319 km analyzed by Kuechly et al [9].
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