Remote sensing of night lights: A review and an outlook for the future

Abstract

Remote sensing of night light emissions in the visible band offers a unique opportunity to directly observe human activity from space. This has allowed a host of applications including mapping urban areas, estimating population and GDP, monitoring disasters and conflicts. More recently, remotely sensed night lights data have found use in understanding the environmental impacts of light emissions (light pollution), including their impacts on human health. In this review, we outline the historical development of night-time optical sensors up to the current state of the art sensors, highlight various applications of night light data, discuss the special challenges associated with remote sensing of night lights with a focus on the limitations of current sensors, and provide an outlook for the future of remote sensing of night lights. While the paper mainly focuses on space borne remote sensing, ground based sensing of night-time brightness for studies on astronomical and ecological light pollution, as well as for calibration and validation of space borne data, are also discussed. Although the development of night light sensors lags behind day-time sensors, we demonstrate that the field is in a stage of rapid development.The worldwide transition to LED lights poses a particular challenge for remote sensing of night lights, and strongly highlights the need for a new generation of space borne night lights instruments. This work shows that future sensors are needed to monitor temporal changes during the night (for example from a geostationary platform or constellation of satellites), and to better understand the angular patterns of light emission (roughly analogous to the BRDF in daylight sensing). Perhaps most importantly, we make the case that higher spatial resolution and multispectral sensors covering the range from blue to NIR are needed to more effectively identify lighting technologies, map urban functions, and monitor energy use.

Evidence That Reduced Air and Road Traffic Decreased Artificial Night-Time Skyglow during COVID-19 Lockdown in Berlin, Germany

“…Monthly composites of night-time light data from the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (NPP) instrument Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night Band (DNB) were used for the analysis, which are freely available at the website of the Earth Observation Group at Payne Institute [38]. These data were composed of moonless and cloud-free data and were shown to be a robust source for night-time light analysis [11][12][13]. The monthly compsites of March 2017 and March 2020 of the Tile2_75N060W (Europe) were downloaded and processed in QGIS (Version 3.10) [39].…”

Identification of Polycentric Cities in China Based on NPP-VIIRS Nighttime Light Data

“…The cumulative emissions from many individual sources of light are different for different wavelengths [72], so further work will consider light emissions for different wavelengths. Moreover, because the time acquiring the NPP-VIIRS images is very late at night when post ornamental lights in China are off, this time bias can have an impact on the extraction results for urban centers [73]. LuoJia1-01 with full coverage of China can make up for that deficiency, so we will consider using LuoJia1-01 data for further study.…”

The Impact Analysis of Land Features to JL1-3B Nighttime Light Data at Parcel Level: Illustrated by the Case of Changchun, China

“…The Luojia 1-01 data are NTL imagery obtained by the high-resolution night light sensor on the Luojia-1 satellite, with a ground resolution of 130 m and a width of 250 km per image. By May 2019, the satellite imagery had fully covered China and some parts of Southeast Asia [ 50 ]. Luojia 1-01 data have a high resolution and rich spatial information, and compared with previous NTL images such as DMSP/OLS, VIIRS/DNB, and other images, the data can obtain better identification results than the predecessors [ 51 ].…”