Urban change through nighttime lights

Nighttime lights imagery has proven to be an invaluable dataset for measuring the intensity of human activity across the globe. The history of the use of the data in various economic studies is well documented, two bibliographies are provided below

1. NOAA's Earth Observation Group
2. Earth Obervation Group at the Colorado School of Mines

Zonal statistics

The basic process of summarizing geospatial datasets within a defined area is called zonal statistics. We take an area defined by a vector dataset, such as an administrative division or a city extent, and use it as a cookie-cutter to extract the relevant geospatial information. In the case of nighttime lights, we summarize