ForensX| Light the Path

Light the Path

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated changes in human population movements and activities around the world. 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.

Photon: Nighttime Light Imagery Analysis Platform

Summary

Using Photon, we hope to empower the public and our policymakers to make data-driven decisions via nighttime satellite imagery. We do this by making NASA VIIRS high-resolution satellite imagery available easily available through an interactive web platform. We offer advanced interactivity and analytical tools to facilitate the efficient study of VIIRS data. For this project, we use the state of New York and its surrounding area as a proof of concept. We study the dynamics of how nighttime lights have changed over the course of the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.

How We Addressed This Challenge

In times of pandemic and national emergency, a comprehensive understanding of the nation’s population dynamics and behavior is needed for proper preparation, policy, and risk mitigation. As demonstrated by NASA, one effective method for gaining this understanding can be through the use of high-resolution nighttime satellite imagery. To better connect policymakers and the public with the scope and plethora of insights available in this data, we developed Proton, an easy to use web interface for interacting with this nighttime light data. We hope that Proton and it’s time-series capabilities will be used to derive actionable insights to better prepare the public and policymakers for emergencies in the future.

How We Developed This Project

Data was procured using NASA’s Earthdata platform from two suites, VIIRS and OMNO2d, and processed using scientific Python libraries. VIIRS Day-Night Band (DNB) data and NO2 information were available at a daily temporal resolution. Due to the magnitude of VIIRS dataset and computational limitations, we limited our search to weekly measurements and the area surrounding New York City. These results were then plotted using Kepler.gl, an open-source library for geospatial data visualizations.

Project Demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DSNzxuNFq9Jt7dVJpR79rj3DNrZISIkH/view?usp=sharing

Project Code
Data & Resources
  1. Román, M.O., Wang, Z., Sun, Q., Kalb, V., Miller, S.D., Molthan, A., Schultz, L., Bell, J., Stokes, E.C., Pandey, B. and Seto, K.C., et al. (2018). NASA's Black Marble nighttime lights product suite. Remote Sensing of Environment 210, 113-143. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2018.03.017.
    1. Nickolay A. Krotkov, Lok N. Lamsal, Sergey V. Marchenko, Edward A. Celarier, Eric J.Bucsela, William H. Swartz, Joanna Joiner and the OMI core team (2019), OMI/Aura NO2 Cloud-Screened Total and Tropospheric Column L3 Global Gridded 0.25 degree x 0.25 degree V3, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), 10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA3007
Tags
#bigdata #lights #keplergl #react #nighttime #lights #population
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.