Tag Archives: nighttime light analysis

Socio-economic analysis with nighttime light series. Step 1: downloading shapefile of the study area

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Context: we analyze economic changes in Colombian municipalities between 1993 and 2020.

We need to download ArcGis, a geographic information system (GIS) for working with maps and geographic information maintained by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). It is used for creating and using maps, compiling geographic data, analyzing mapped information, sharing and discovering geographic information, using maps and geographic information in a range of applications, and managing geographic information in a database. Particularly important for the purpose of this post is ArcMap, one of the applications, which is primarily used to view, edit, create, and analyze geospatial data. In the absence of license for this software, you can use free software such as GVSig.

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Socio-economic analysis with nighttime light series: downloading nighttime images

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Context: we analyze economic changes in Colombian municipalities between 1993 and 2020.

In this post, we focus on how to download our “raw data”, i.e. the nighttime light data for Colombia.

Step 1: Download nighttime light series from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Particularly Version 4 DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series (DMSP) – The DMSP annual composite data contain average radiance values of cloud-free coverages, reflecting the persistent lights from cities, villages, and roads, with a spatial resolution of about 900m, and a temporal coverage of 1992 to 2013 – and VIIRS data which is available from 2013 on and with is a finer spatial resolution of 450m approximately. We will later do a post on the particularities of VIIRS, here we focus on DMSP.

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Socio-economic analysis with nighttime light series: uploading nighttime light file to a GIS software

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Context: we analyze economic changes in Colombian municipalities between 1993 and 2020.

After having downloaded nighttime images from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and install ArcGIS or any other GIS software in our computer, we proceed now to upload nighttime files for our analysis.

NOAA provide images covering the whole world which can be difficult to manage in terms of size. For that reason, we will only upload the images corresponding to our study are, i.e. Colombia. To do that, make sure you have uploaded first the map of the study are, here Colombia (see previous post)

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