At night, satellite images of Earth capture a uniquely human signal – artificial lighting. Remotely-sensed lights at night provide a new data source for improving our understanding of interactions between human systems and the environment. NASA has developed the Black Marble, a daily calibrated, corrected, and validated product suite, so night light data can be used effectively for scientific observations. Black Marble is playing a vital role in research on light pollution, illegal fishing, fires, disaster impacts and recovery, and human settlements and associated energy infrastructures. The data (originally retrieved from the VIIRS day night band sensor) has been corrected by multiple novel algorithms, providing high-quality, cloud-free, atmospheric-, terrain-, vegetation-, snow-, lunar-, and stray light-corrected nighttime radiances.
This webinar will focus on building the skills needed to choose the appropriate night lights product, acquire and understand Black Marble data, and how to use the data in analyses for tracking urbanization, electrification, and disaster monitoring.
This work was partially supported by the GEO Human Planet Project #16-GEO16-0055.
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