New Orleans power outage seen via satellite imagery

After Hurricane Ida, New Orleans experienced power outages. The NASA Earth Observatory show the outages by comparing night lights on August 31, 2021 against night lights on August 9, 2021:

VIIRS has a low-light sensor—the day/night band—that measures light emissions and reflections. This capability has made it possible to distinguish the intensity, types, and sources of lights and to observe how they change. The data are then processed by the Black Marble team to account for changes in the landscape (such as flooding), the atmosphere, and the Moon phase, and to filter out stray light from sources that are not electric lights.

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Map of nighttime lights normalized by population

You’ve probably seen the composite map of lights at night from NASA. It looks a lot like population density. Tim Wallace adjusted the map for population, so that you can see (roughly) the areas that produce more light per person.

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Shift in world’s night lights

NASA recently released composite images of the Earth at night based on 2016 data, which was a follow-up to similar images for 2012. John Nelson compared the two, specifically looking for new lights that came on (blue) and lights that went off (pink). The former, suggesting growth and the latter, suggesting decline.

Full zoomable version of the Earth here.

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Holiday lights from space

Lights from space

You've likely seen the classic globe image that shows Earth at night. It's a composite image using data collected over a nine-day period, so you kind of see what the planet looks like if it were night at the same time everywhere. While interesting in its own right, it lacks a time component. The researchers are on it and noticed an increase in light during the holiday months.

It's official — our holiday lights are so bright we can see them from space. Thanks to the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint mission between NASA and NOAA, scientists are presenting a new way of studying satellite data that can illustrate patterns in holiday lights, both during Christmas and the Holy Month of Ramadan. These new tools can provide new insights into how energy consumption behaviors vary across different cultural settings.

More details in the video below.

[via Boing Boing]

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