Nowadays many of the urban areas in Asian countries give more priority to economic development than to environmental issues. Information showing developing stages of urban area are generally restricted to published statistics by governments. Thus it is difficult to collect cross-sectional urban environmental indicators under a common criteria.
DMSP (Defensive Meteorological Satellite Program)/OLS (Operational Linescan System) Stable Light Image (SLI) shows frequencies of light observation on the earth during nighttime. This study proposes a method to estimate spatial distribution of economic activity using SLI defined as an accessible indicator of light observation.
From the enormous archives in NOAA National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), the authors established temporal data sets in Asian region for 1992-3, 1996, 1998 and figured out impacts of
-Asian economic crisis (1997)
-stress in the marginal zone between India and Pakistan
-temporal variability of fisheries in the Japan Sea (the Eastern Sea) through the analyses on these data sets.
They also compared these data sets summed up in each province in China with some published statistics on socio-economic factors. Intensity of the nocturnal light showed high alterability for GDP and consumption of electricity (per km2).