We will use VIIRS night lights to investigate changes in night lights in Uzbekistan. We will link the changes in night lights with already collected field photographs at the edges of the urban areas.
We will first evaluate and compare different nightlight satellite products to investigate which product appears to be the most consistent and accurate. Next we will evaluate the nightlight intensity against building densities and road densities.

Relevance to research/projects at GRS or other groups

This project is part of a larger research study focused on Central Asia.

Objectives and Research questions

• Investigate available nightlight time series to identify differences and similarities.
• Link the nightlight changes with building and road density.
• Evaluate the nightlight data against ground data at the urban edges.

Requirements

• Good Remote Sensing background.
• Geoscripting.
• Affinity with urban remote sensing analysis.
• Interest in land surface temperatures.

Literature and information

• Global NPP-VIIRS-like nighttime light (2000-2023)
• Chen, Z., Yu, B., Yang, C., Zhou, Y., Yao, S., Qian, X., Wang, C., Wu, B., and Wu, J.: An extended time series (2000–2018) of global NPP-VIIRS-like nighttime light data from a cross-sensor calibration, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 889–906.

• Harmonized Global Night Time Lights (1992-2021)

• Li, Xuecao; Zhou, Yuyu; zhao, Min; Zhao, Xia (2020): Harmonization of DMSP and VIIRS nighttime light data from 1992-2020 at the global scale. figshare. Dataset.
• https://gee-community-catalog.org/projects/srunet_npp_viirs_ntl/?h=night
  Chen, X., Wang, Z., Zhang, F., Shen, G., & Chen, Q. (2024). A global annual simulated VIIRS nighttime light dataset from 1992 to 2023. Scientific Data, 11(1380).

Theme(s): Sensing & measuring; Human – space interaction