Shift Estimation for DMSP-OLS Night-Time Light Rasters in 2009–2011

摘要

Night-time lights in satellite imagery are considered to be related to population and human activities such as urbanization, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Line-Scan System (OLS) instrument has provided a long-term dataset of global night lights covering more than two decades. However, the F162009, F182010, and F182011 rasters of DMSP-OLS version 4 night-time lights time series are shifted for unknown reasons, which may influence spatial time series comparisons. This study presents a statistical correlation method based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) to estimate these shifts in longitude and latitude with greater accuracy, and recommends the use of them to generate the accompanying Tiff World (TFW) files of tiff images for these rasters.