Investigating Development of Countries Through Nightlights

Xinyi Hope Fu, Chiara Zarro, Davide De Pasquale, Silvia Liberata Ullo

Abstract: The goal of this project is to investigate global nightlights and light pollution as indicators for the economic growth and urbanization of a nation. We test this proposition using the nightlight data obtained by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Through examining the changes over time of spatial nightlight patterns for different developing countries on Google Earth Engine (GEE), we investigate how they correlate to countries' development indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other parameters which represent new reference indicators with respect to previous research in the literature. A preliminary analysis brings to interesting results and discussion.