Abstract
City lights, fishing boats, and oil fields are the major sources of nighttime lights, therefore the nighttime light images provide a unique source to map human beings and their activities from outer space. While most of the scholars focused on application of nighttime light remote sensing in urbanization and regional development, the actual fields are much wider. This paper summarized the applications of nighttime light remote sensing into fields such as the estimation of socioeconomic parameters, monitoring urbanization, evaluation of important events, analyzing light pollution, fishery, etc. For estimation of socioeconomic parameters, the most promising progress is that Gross Domestic Product and its growth rate have been estimated with statistical data and nighttime light data using econometric models. For monitoring urbanization, urban area and its dynamics can be extracted using different classification methods, and spatial analysis has been employed to map urban agglomeration. As sharp changes of nighttime light are associated with important socioeconomic events, the images have been used to evaluate humanitarian disasters, especially in the current Syrian and Iraqi wars. Light pollution is another hotspot of nighttime light application, as the night light is related to some diseases and abnormal behavior of animals, and the nighttime light images can provide light pollution information on large scales so that it is much easier to analyze the effects of light pollutions. In each field, we listed typical cases of the applications. At last, future studies of nighttime light remote sensing have been predicted.
Highlights
The US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) started in the 1970s
Scientists occasionally discovered that DMSP/Operational Linescan System (OLS) can record city lights and other light-emitting at cloud-free night, which is the origin of the nighttime light remote sensing (Welch 1980)
With the more availability of nighttime light remote sensing data, especially the 22-year DMSP/OLS nighttime imagery which was released by the United States National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), researches of spatial data mining around these data have entered into rapid development
Summary
The US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) started in the 1970s. Its Operational Linescan System (OLS) was designed to capture the faint m oonlight reflected from clouds at night, in order to gain the night clouds’ distribution information. Scientists occasionally discovered that DMSP/OLS can record city lights and other light-emitting at cloud-free night (see Figure 1), which is the origin of the nighttime light remote sensing (Welch 1980). In addition to reflecting night city lights, nighttime light imagery can capture fishing boat lights, natural gas combustion, forest fires, and other lights. They are widely used in fields of socioeconomic parameters estimation, regional development, event evaluation, and fishery monitoring. Compared to general remote sensing satellite imagery, nighttime light remote sensing imagery can more reflect human activity. They have been widely used in the studies of social science. It is worth noting that, despite the fact that the sources of nighttime light remote sensing imagery have expanded from traditional DMSP/OLS imagery to multi-source imagery, DMSP/OLS imagery with advantages of rich historical archived data and wide spatial cover, and yet most nighttime light remote sensing researches continue to be carried out based on such imagery
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