By Geographic Book
NASA scientists have released new global maps of Earth at night, providing the clearest-yet views of the patterns of human settlements across our planet.
Satellite images of Earth at night—often referred to as “night lights”—have been a curiosity for the public and a tool of fundamental research for at least 25 years.
The images on this page show Earth’s night lights as observed in 2016; they are drawn from a new global composite map (below) that was just added to Worldview and GIBS.
To make the new maps, Román and colleagues examined the different ways that light is radiated, scattered, and reflected by land, atmospheric, and ocean surfaces.
The principal challenge in nighttime satellite imaging is accounting for the phases of the Moon, which constantly vary the amount of light shining on Earth, though in predictable ways.
Román and colleagues have been building remote sensing techniques to filter out these sources of extraneous light, gathering a better and more consistent signal of how human-driven patterns and processes are changing.
NASA team is now automating the processing so that users will be able to view nighttime imagery within hours of acquisition.
The National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has released an atlas called Decadal Change of Night Time Light (NTL) over India from Space
The NASA team envisions many other potential uses by research, meteorological, and civic groups. For instance, daily nighttime imagery could be used to help monitor unregulated or unreported fishing.
long-term project, Román is working with colleagues from around the world to improve global and regional estimates of carbon dioxide emissions.
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