Spatial-Temporal Variation of Urbanization Based on DMSP-OLS in the Yangtze River Delta Region

抄録

Accurate and timely information about the dynamics of urban expansion is crucial to find the relationships between urban expansion and the economy or the population shifts. Clarifying the driving force of urbanization, the estimate of its effects, and promotion of an effective urbanization process in China became the topic which raised more and more attention. This study was based on one of the most widely used products which named DMSP-OLS (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System), DMSP has been applied to monitor meteorological, oceanographic and solar-terrestrial physics and OLS is the main remote sensing of DMSP. This paper used DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights (NTL) data as a proxy for urban area and we consider that it will help to build an understanding of urban growth within this region. Geographic Information System (GIS) was employed to identify the cities and urban agglomerations together with their NTL data in the Yangtze River delta region, and spatial statistics were used to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of NTL growth. The linear regression method was carried out to get the correlation relationship between observed development process and the statistics through the spatial-temporal variation from 2003 to 2013, combined with official statistics indexes.