Earth at Night 2001

  • Credit

    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Earth at Night

Earth at Night 2001

The influence humans have had on their planet can be seen from space. Viewing Earth at night, we see the lights of countless villages, towns, and cities. Fires from slash-and-burn farming and the burn-off of natural gas in oil fields appear in red and yellow. This perspective unveils the breadth of human activity on Earth. It spans the globe.

This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, and Japan. Many large cities are located near rivers or oceans so that they can exchange goods cheaply by boat. Particularly dark areas include the central parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The above image is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) currently operates four satellites carrying the Operational Linescan System (OLS) in low-altitude polar orbits. Three of these satellites record nighttime data. The DMSP-OLS has a unique capability to detect low levels of visible-near infrared (VNIR) radiance at night. With the OLS 'VIS' band data it is possible to detect clouds illuminated by moonlight, plus lights from cities, towns, industrial sites, gas flares, and ephemeral events such as fires and lightning-illuminated clouds. The Nighttime Lights of the World data set is compiled from the October 1994 - March 1995 DMSP nighttime data collected when moonlight was low. Using the OLS thermal infrared band, areas containing clouds were removed and the remaining area used in the time series. This animation is derived from an image created by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon from data provided by Christopher Elvidge of the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center.

Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    DMSP/OLS

  • Animation ID

    2276

  • Video ID

    SVS2001-0023

  • Start Timecode

    01:03:25:00

  • End Timecode

    01:04:33:09

  • Animator

    Stuart A. Snodgrass, Robert Simmon, Craig Mayhew

  • Studio

    SVS

  • Visualization Date

    2001/10/19

  • Scientist

    Marc Imhoff (NASA/GSFC), Christopher Elvidge (NOAA/NGDC)

  • Datasets

    Earth at Night

  • Keywords

    Night, Fires, Lights

  • DLESE Subject

    Human geography

  • Data Date

    1994/10 - 1995/03

  • Pao ID

    G01-074, G03-046

  • Story URL

    http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?5826

  • Animation Type

    Regular