Light the Path

Nighttime lights imagery taken from space shows extensive networks of light stretching across the globe in the dark of night. In addition to being beautiful, these images contain valuable information about human populations and have been used to identify changes in those populations over time, such as the growth of cities and migrations between urban and rural areas.

Remote sensing data from NASA Earth-observing satellites may be able to delineate human activity changes by observing chemical changes in the atmosphere, and perhaps temperature variations, particularly in and around major population centers.

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated changes in human population movements and activities around the world. Some of these changes were policy-related— for example, airline travel became limited and countries implemented various border closures and travel restrictions. Some of these changes may be less obvious, such as people leaving major cities for less-crowded areas.

Your challenge is to use Earth observations to explore how human activity and regional land-based human movement patterns may have shifted in response to COVID-19.

Considerations:

• How can understanding population movement from the COVID-19 pandemic be useful for future infectious disease spread prediction and response planning?
• How can you communicate COVID-related population changes and movements to decision-makers or the public in a way that creates actionable information for future policy-making? For example, can remotely sensed data inform when populations are effectively isolating during shelter-in-place orders to help ensure compliance with local or national policies, such as phased return-to-work at the end of the pandemic or during periods of re-emergence?
• How can you combine Earth observations with other indicators of movement patterns to learn more? For example, scholars have compared changes shown through nighttime lights imagery with population density changes shown by various types of digital mobility data.
• Consider the use of satellite navigation data to support epidemiological analysis and cross-certification, and/or provide contextual situational awareness for epidemiological mapping.
• Examine the changes in nighttime light images to identify locations people have traveled to since leaving major cities (e.g., small East Coast towns growing in population as people left New York City for vacation homes).
• Are there unusual changes in human activity or population density in specific parts of the globe? Can these movements be monitored on a nightly basis?
• How do population density assessments from space compare to other digital mobility data?
• Given that most world economies are driven by fossil fuels, economists may use NO2 data, a non-traditional source of data for this community, to assess the impact of the pandemic on economic activity around the world, including in countries without reliable economic data.

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