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Night-time lights: A global, long term look at links to socio-economic trends

We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data-the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset-surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-03, Vol.12 (3), p.e0174610
Main Authors: Proville, Jeremy, Zavala-Araiza, Daniel, Wagner, Gernot
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data-the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset-surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0174610