Authors
Jinke Liu, Yifei Zhu, Xuesheng Zhao, Wenbin Sun, Fan Yang
Published in
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland). Volume 26. Issue 17. Sep 06, 2026. Epub Sep 06, 2026.
Abstract
Nighttime light (NTL) data is widely used to monitor urban development, economic activity and population distribution, supporting socio-economic analysis and sustainable development planning. SDGSAT-1 NTL data, with its multiple bands and high resolution, has become an important source for studying human activity patterns. However, directly summing radiance values on geographic grids assumes equal contributions from all grid cells, regardless of the differences in the ground area represented by each cell. As a result, regional nighttime light totals may be systematically distorted, particularly in cross-latitude analyses where pixel areas differ substantially. To address this aggregation issue, this study proposes a physically explicit area-weighting framework that converts SDGSAT-1 radiance to radiant flux by incorporating the actual surface area represented by each grid cell. The framework is validated using 25 cities spanning different latitudes and development levels in the Northern Hemisphere. Results show that the radiant flux model, which captures total emitted power, demonstrates improved performance over radiance-based aggregation (a density-based measure) in population estimation (R2 = 0.85 vs. 0.82). By shifting from light intensity to integrated total energy, this approach improves cross-latitude comparability and enhances the methodological robustness of NTL-based analyses.
PMID:
42740285
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 15 Sep 2026.
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