Introduction to Nighttime Light Data

This video is from a workshop held as part of the Geo4Dev 2020 Symposium and Workshop. It covers material from the World Bank’s Open Night Lights tutorial.

The video introduces the fundamentals of analysing nighttime light data from satellite sensors, focusing on two key datasets:

• DMSP-OLS – a long-term historical dataset dating back to the 1990s, though with coarser resolution and inconsistent calibration.

• VIIRS DNB (“Black Marble”) – a modern sensor providing higher-resolution, radiometrically calibrated observations since 2012.

You can view the full tutorial on nightlights, including practical exercises using Jupyter Notebooks, on the World Bank’s GitHub:
https://worldbank.github.io/OpenNightLights/welcome.html