Abstract
The combination of decameter resolution Sentinel 2 and hectometer resolution VIIRS offers the potential to quantify urban morphology at scales spanning the range from individual objects to global scale settlement networks. Multi-season spectral characteristics of built environments provide an independent complement to night light brightness compared for 12 urban systems. High fractions of spectrally stable impervious surface combined with persistent deep shadow between buildings are compared to road network density and outdoor lighting inferred from night light. These comparisons show better spatial agreement and more detailed representation of a wide range of built environments than possible using Landsat and DMSP-OLS. However, they also show that no single low luminance brightness threshold provides optimal spatial correlation to built extent derived from Sentinel in different urban systems. A 4-threshold comparison of 6 regional night light networks shows consistent spatial scaling, spanning 3 to 5 orders of magnitude in size and number with rank-size slopes consistently near −1. This scaling suggests a dynamic balance among the processes of nucleation, growth and interconnection. Rank-shape distributions based on √Area/Perimeter of network components scale similarly to rank-size distributions at higher brightness thresholds, but show both progressive then abrupt increases in fractal dimension of the largest, most interconnected network components at lower thresholds.
Highlights
The spatial form of urban land cover informs our understanding of its function and evolution
These metrics are useful for direct comparison of the built area density to the night light brightness (e.g., Figure 6), and to demonstrate the site-specific threshold correlations (e.g., Figure 7) but without some form of cross calibration, the metrics are not valid for computation of morphology parameters
Multi-season spectral characteristics of built environments associated with urban development provide an independent complement to the night light brightness that is increasingly being used for spatial analysis of urban systems
Summary
The spatial form of urban land cover informs our understanding of its function and evolution. The utility of remote sensing to rigorous characterization of urban morphology was recognized by Mesev and Longley [1], who introduced a methodology to quantify the fractal form of urban morphology from remotely sensed optical imagery in the context of location theory This provided a basis for establishing the utility of remotely sensed imagery to rigorous quantitative analysis of the built environment in conjunction with the theoretical basis for its fractal nature as observed at comparable scales [2]. Since this time, the vast majority of effort in the area of urban remote sensing has focused on the challenges of identification and classification of settlements, with less attention being given to the quantification of the built environment’s form and its relationship to the function of urban systems
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