NASA's Black Marble nighttime lights product suite

Monitoring Disaster-Related Power Outages Using Nasa Black Marble Nighttime Light Product

“…The Black Marble product retrieval strategy uses a novel "Turning off the Moon" approach that combines cloud-free, atmospheric-, terrain-, vegetation-, snow-, lunar-, and stray light-corrected nighttime VIIRS DNB radiances, daytime DNB surface reflectance, Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF)/Albedo, and Lunar irradiance values to minimize the influence of extraneous artifacts and biases (Román et al, 2018;Román and Stokes, 2015). The atmospheric correction routines used in Black Marble NTL processing rely on the use of accurate vector radiative transfer modelling of the coupled atmosphere-surface system to compensate for aerosols, water vapor, and ozone impacts on the NTL radiances.…”

“…This unprecedent degree of precision beats the current JPSS requirement by a factor of 7x. The BRDF and albedo, retrieved from daytime multi-angular DNB surface reflectance observations, was shown to be essential for the removal of extraneous sources of NTL emissions in the Black Marble VNP46 product (Román et al, 2018). The Black Marble NTL products, produced at NASA's Land Science Investigator-led Processing Systems (Land SIPS), is available at 500 m resolution since 19 January, 2012.…”

“…However, the lack of onboard DMSP/OLS calibration and saturation in bright urban areas prevent the quantitative radiance variation analysis to monitor outage conditions. The Day/Night Band (DNB) sensor of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on board the Suomi-National Polarorbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) has significantly improved calibration performance (Lee et al, 2015;Liao et al, 2013;Xiong et al, 2014), therefore increasing the accuracy of NTL products (Román et al, 2018). The satellite NTL products have been widely used for urban remote sensing science and applications across spatial and temporal scales (Chen and Nordhaus, 2015;Guo et al, 2015;Levin and Zhang, 2017;Li et al, 2013;Ma et al, 2014;Sharma et al, 2016;Yu et al, 2015).…”

“…This is particularly true for daily NTL products since: (1) moonlight is a dominant source of noise that impacts the analysis of surface artificial lights; (2) the amount of reflected lunar radiance is comparative to the lit environment of villages or small towns, in particular over surfaces with high albedos (Román et al, 2018); (3) the contribution from Lunar radiance impacts analyses of temporal NTL patterns (e.g. power outage monitoring).…”

The Lights of Iraq: Electricity Usage and the Iraqi War-Fare Regime

“…This is defined as "the condition of being successful or thriving, especially with reference to economic well-being" Genschel et al (2016, p. 27 Román et al (2018).…”