International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Rapid urbanization and economic development inevitably lead to light pollution, which has become a universal environmental issue. In order to reveal the change trend of light pollution in China, Images from 1992 to 2012 were selected from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) and systematically corrected to ensure the consistency. Furthermore, we employed a linear regression trend method to measure China’s light pollution trend across national scales. We found that: (1) China’s light pollution expanded significantly in provincial capital cities over the past 21 years and hot-spots of light pollution were located in the eastern coastal region. The Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regions have formed light pollution stretch areas.

Index Terms—Light pollution, nighttime light images, DMSP/OLS, time series, China.

The authors are with the Institute of Remote sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China (e-mail: jiangwei@radi.ac.cn, hegj@radi.ac.cn, and longtf@radi.ac.cn).

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Cite: Wei Jiang, Guojin He, and Tengfei Long, "Using Time Series Nighttime Images to Measure Light Pollution Trend in China," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 622-625, 2017.