New satellite images of the Earth at night can be achieved with earth observation by continuous remote sensing throughout all day. The images give the most complete view of contemporary global human settlement, especially cities. Beijing is the capital, one of the most important and typical big cities of China. This study estimated economic activities of Beijing using remote sensing nighttime earth surface light data from S-NPP VIIRS DNB night data with corrections, with a focus on the relationship between economic index and city lights. Our study aims to eliminate the influence of cloud, moonlight and atmosphere on artificial light sources at night, in order to achieve more accurate inversion of ground artificial light source information. The results proved that there is a strong linear regression relationship between corrected DNB nighttime data and GDP with 0.79405 fitting coefficient, which was higher than the linear fitting coefficient (0.2817) of average radiance composite images data and GDP. The linear fitting coefficient of the tertiary industry and corrected DNB nighttime data is 0.76102 is higher than 0.1836 of the tertiary industry and average radiance composite images data. Therefore, the approach was provided for the dynamic evaluation of social and economic data, and the developed urban light fusion product will lay a foundation for the derivative application of backend and the inversion and application of night light data in other locations.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer (VIIRS) day/night band (DNB) onboard Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite offers a wide range of applications at night, ranging from fire detection, meteorological phenomena to observations of anthropogenic light sources. It is becoming a useful tool to monitor and quantify these ships by detecting the light emitted by the lamps. In this study, a threshold-based method is presented to automatically identify the ships. Before detection, several pre-processing steps including contrast enhancement and instrument noise removal are conducted; then the background value is subtracted from the original image to reduce the blurred area around the target, which can further make the gathered ships isolated; In addition, the effects of some interference sources such as ionospheric energetic particles and thin clouds are also taken into consideration for improving the detection rate. Finally, the proposed threshold-based method is applied to the DNB images over study areas in Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea in China. The detection results show that the proposed method can detect more than 81% of ships when comparing with those from Automatic Identification System (AIS).
Radiometric calibration of the Landsat-8 operational land imager (OLI) sensor is a key step that enables additional quantitative research and application of the data. This study introduces a ground reflected radiance-based approach to vicarious radiometric validate the Landsat-8 OLI onboard radiometric calibration results. Vicarious radiometric calibration/validation field campaign of the Landsat-8 OLI sensor was carried out at the Baotou site in Inner Mongolia, China, on March 27, 2015, October 28, 2015, March 29, 2016, and April 21, 2016. The relative errors of the OLI bands are within 5% for the ground reflected radiance-based approach when compared with satellite observations of top of atmosphere (TOA) radiance in the OLI bands, and the average 1σ standard deviation of the four results using the vicarious radiometric calibration is less than 0.025. A well-calibrated Terra MODIS sensor was used to cross-validate the Landsat-8 OLI sensor, and the relative errors are within 10%. The results suggest that the OLI onboard the Landsat-8 satellite displays stable radiometric performance for the four calibration/validation days. An uncertainty analysis of the ground reflected radiance-based approach showed an overall uncertainty of less than 4.5%, taking into account uncertainty sources, including surface characteristics, atmospheric characteristics, radiative transfer, solar irradiance, and the calibration model.
The day/night band (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) represents a major advancement in night time imaging capabilities. DNB covers almost seven orders of magnitude in its dynamic range from full sunlight to half-moon. To achieve this large dynamic range, it uses four charge-coupled device arrays in three gain stages. The low gain stage (LGS) gain is calibrated using the solar diffuser. In operations, the medium and high gain stage values are determined by multiplying the gain ratios between the medium gain stage, and LGS, and high gain stage (HGS) and LGS, respectively. This paper focuses on independently verifying the radiometric accuracy and stability of DNB HGS using DNB observations of ground vicarious calibration sites under lunar illumination at night. Dome C in Antarctica in the southern hemisphere and Greenland in the northern hemisphere are chosen as the vicarious calibration sites. Nadir observations of these high latitude regions by VIIRS are selected during perpetual night season, i.e., from April to August for Dome C and from November to January for Greenland over the years 2012 to 2013. Additional selection criteria, such as lunar phase being more than half-moon and no influence of straylight effects, are also applied in data selection. The lunar spectral irradiance model, as a function of Sun–Earth–Moon distances and lunar phase, is used to determine the top-of-atmosphere reflectance at the vicarious site. The vicariously derived long-term reflectance from DNB observations agrees with the reflectance derived from Hyperion observations. The vicarious trending of DNB radiometric performance using DOME-C and Greenland under moon light shows that the DNB HGS radiometric variability (relative accuracy to lunar irradiance model and Hyperion observation) is within 8%. Residual variability is also discussed.
The Day/Night Band (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) represents a major advancement in night time imaging capabilities. The VIIRS DNB sensor is affected by stray light. Straylight effect on the DNB instrument is due to solar illumination entering the optical path after the satellite passes through the day-night terminator projected on Earth’s surface. It results in an overall increase in the recorded radiance values. This effect is more significant during solstice. After the launch of Suomi-NPP in October 2011, there was a gray haze in radiance images observed by DNB due to straylight, and straylight correction has been implemented to remove this effect. This study performs vicarious validation of straylight correction for VIIRS DNB band using Dome C in Antarctic. Nadir observations of these high latitude regions by VIIRS are selected during perpetual night season, i.e. from April to July during the year 2014 under various lunar phases. The dependence of observed radiance over Dome C on lunar phases and the cross-comparison between DNB observations for events with/without straylight are shown in this paper. This paper presents an effective method to assess the performance of straylight correction for VIIRS DNB in Southern Hemisphere.
Feasibility of using structured light for remote sensing and 3D damage assessments have been explored in this study. Although near real-time reconstruction of 3D objects in color is an active research area which possesses a wide variety of application including disaster assessments, its application to remote sensing is relatively new. Structured light can be applied to aircraft, UAV platforms, as well as provide in situ accurate disaster assessments. It also provides ground truth for validating satellite observations. The feasibility for this type of applications is investigated with model building and automobile experiments and has produced promising preliminary results.
Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) has been collecting global night
light imaging data for more than 40 years. With the launch of Suomi-NPP satellite in 2011, the Day/Night Band (DNB)
of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) represents a major advancement in night time imaging
capabilities because it surpasses DMSP-OLS in having broader radiometric measurement range, more accurate
radiometric calibration, finer spatial resolution, and better geometric quality. DMSP-OLS sensor does not have on-board
calibration and data is recorded as digital number (DN). Therefore, VIIRS-DNB provides opportunities to perform
quantitative radiometric calibration of DMSP-OLS sensor. In this paper, vicarious radiometric calibration of DMSP-OLS
at night under lunar illumination is performed. Events were selected when satellite flies above Dome C in Antarctic at
night and the moon illuminates the site with lunar phase being more than quarter moon. Additional event selection
criteria to limit solar and lunar zenith angle range have been applied to ensure no influence of stray light effects and
adequate lunar illumination. The data from DMSP-OLS and VIIRS-DNB were analyzed to derive the characteristic
radiance or DN for the region of interest. The scaling coefficient for converting DMSP-OLS DN values into radiance is
determined to optimally merge the observation of DMSP-OLS into VIIRS-DNB radiance data as a function of lunar
phases. Calibrating the nighttime light data collected by the DMSP-OLS sensors into radiance unit can enable
applications of using both sensor data and advance the applications of night time imagery data.
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