Abstract
Improving human well-being is increasingly recognized as essential for movement toward a sustainable and desirable future. Estimates of different aspects of human well-being, such as Gross Domestic Product, or percentage of population with access to electric power, or measuring the distribution of income in society are often fraught with problems. There are few standardized methods of data collection; in addition, the required data is not obtained in a reliable manner and on a repetitive basis in many parts of the world. Consequently, inter-comparability of the data that does exist becomes problematic. Data derived from nighttime satellite imagery has helped develop various globally consistent proxy measures of human well-being at the gridded, sub-national, and national level. We review several ways in which nighttime satellite imagery has been used to measure the human well-being within nations.
Highlights
IntroductionMeteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-Operation Linescan System (OLS)) have become a recognizable spatially explicit global icon of human presence on the planet
Images of the ―Earth at Night‖ derived from nighttime satellite imagery provided by the DefenseMeteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-Operation Linescan System (OLS)) have become a recognizable spatially explicit global icon of human presence on the planet
The annual, global stable lights are generated by averaging the individual, cloud-free orbits of the Operation Linescan System (OLS)
Summary
Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) have become a recognizable spatially explicit global icon of human presence on the planet. The close relation between the spatial distribution of nighttime lights and economic activity has been observed and utilized in several studies before [2,3,4,5,6,7].
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