Introduction to nighttime light data of Chinese provinces, cities and counties

 Lightings at night, on the one hand, directly reflect the level of local industrialization and urbanization; on the other hand, they can also partially reflect the concentrated distribution of the population. At the same time, according to the brightness of nighttime lights on the surface, which can characterize the intensity of human activities to a certain extent, long-term series of nighttime light data have important reference value for urban development research.

 Currently, nighttime light data are mainly used for urban expansion research, socioeconomic factor estimation, and other fields such as environment, disasters, fisheries, and energy.

• Urban expansion monitoring: Today’s world is in a period of rapid development, and the urban areas provided by traditional statistical methods often change before they play a role. Nighttime light images that reflect the characteristics of human activities take cities and towns as the target area, providing an accurate, direct, economical, and time-saving method for urban expansion monitoring.

• Estimation of Socioeconomic Factors: The contrast between bright and dark areas in a light image makes it a powerful tool for studying intensive human activities and their impacts. Obviously, there is a positive correlation between light intensity and socioeconomic factors. This quantitative relationship can be used to carry out socioeconomic factor estimation research, such as urbanization level estimation, population distribution estimation, GDP, energy consumption, carbon emissions and other factors. Estimate

• Other aspects: In addition to socioeconomic data research, nighttime light images have also been tried to be applied to the environment, disasters, fisheries, energy and other fields. Currently, this image is used to conduct some exploratory research in aspects such as spatial analysis of light pollution propagation, fire control and resource protection, fishery monitoring, and natural gas incineration monitoring.

 CnOpenData launches nighttime lighting data for provinces, cities and counties in China. It is divided into three tables based on the administrative division levels of provinces, prefecture-level cities, districts and counties, and mainly provides average data on nighttime lighting.

Time interval

1992-2022

Field display

Sample data

China Nighttime Light Data-Provincial Level

China Nighttime Lighting Data-Prefecture Level

China Nighttime Lighting Data - District and County Level

Data update frequency

Annual Update

文件下载