Poverty Evaluation Using NPP-VIIRS Nighttime Light Composite Data at the County Level in China
- 18 February 2015
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
- Vol. 8 (3), 1217-1229
- https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2015.2399416
Abstract
Poverty has appeared as one of the long-term predicaments facing development of human society during the 21st century. Estimation of regional poverty level is a key issue for making strategies to eliminate poverty. This paper aims to evaluate the ability of the nighttime light composite data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night Band (DNB) carried by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) Satellite in estimating poverty at the county level in China. Two major experiments are involved in this study, which include 1) 38 counties of Chongqing city and 2) 2856 counties of China. The first experiment takes Chongqing as an example and combines 10 socioeconomic variables into an integrated poverty index (IPI). IPI is then used as a reference to validate the accuracy of poverty evaluation using the average light index (ALI) derived from NPP-VIIRS data. Linear regression and comparison of the class ranks have been employed to verify the correlation between ALI and IPI. The results show a good correlation between IPI and ALI, with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.8554, and the class ranks of IPI and API show relative closeness at the county level. The second experiment examines all counties in China and makes a comparison between ALI values and national poor counties (NPC). The comparison result shows a general agreement between the NPC and the counties with low ALI values. This study reveals that the NPP-VIIRS data can be a useful tool for evaluating poverty at the county level in China.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (41471449)
- Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (14ZR1412200)
- Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (15ZZ026)
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- Using Nighttime Satellite Imagery as a Proxy Measure of Human Well-BeingSustainability, 2013
- What is so great about nighttime VIIRS data for the detection and characterization of combustion sources?Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network, 2013
- Brightness of Nighttime Lights as a Proxy for Freight Traffic: A Case Study of ChinaIEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2013
- Evaluation of eco-security of cultivated land requisition-compensation balance based on improved set pair analysisActa Ecologica Sinica, 2013
- Application of the Entropy Weight and TOPSIS Method in Safety Evaluation of Coal MinesProcedia Engineering, 2011
- Poverty and Inequality in the Rural Brazilian Amazon: A Multidimensional ApproachHuman Ecology, 2011
- A comment on multidimensional poverty indicesThe Journal of Economic Inequality, 2011
- A multi-objective multi-sectoral economy–energy–environment model: Application to PortugalEnergy, 2011
- Robust Multidimensional Poverty ComparisonsThe Economic Journal, 2006
- A Class of Decomposable Poverty MeasuresEconometrica, 1984