ABSTRACT
Nighttime lights are a class of urban remote sensing products derived from satellite sensors with specialized low light imaging capabilities. To date, two sensors have collected global nighttime lights data. The original instrument is the operational linescan system (OLS) flown by the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). The earliest version of the OLS began collecting data in the early 1970s. A digital OLS data archive was established in 1992 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). The second instrument flown with a global collection capability for low light imaging data is the visible infrared imaging radiometer suite (VIIRS) flown on the NASA/NOAA SNPP satellite, launched in 2011. The VIIRS offers substantial
6.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................97 6.2 Reprocessing of the DMSP Archive ............................................................. 100 6.3 Intercalibration and Data Extraction ............................................................ 100 6.4 Defining Nighttime Lights Behavior ............................................................ 103
6.4.1 Countries with Rapid Growth in Lighting ........................................ 103 6.4.2 Countries with Moderate Growth in Lighting .................................. 108 6.4.3 Antipole Lighting Countries ............................................................. 108 6.4.4 Countries with Stable or Erratic Lighting ........................................ 111 6.4.5 Countries with GDP-Centric Lighting .............................................. 111 6.4.6 Countries with Population-Centric Lighting .................................... 111
6.5 Discussion ..................................................................................................... 116 6.6 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 117 Acknowledgment ................................................................................................... 118 References .............................................................................................................. 118
improvements in spatial resolution, radiometric calibration, and usable dynamic range when compared to the DMSP low light imaging data.
