Kind: captions
Language: en
You might be used to seeing the world
like this,
but this is NASA's night lights, and it
allows us to see what's happening on the
Earth when the world goes dark. It's
important because it gives us an insight
into world events on a daily basis, or
should I say a nightly basis. and it
gives us a chance to analyze very recent
updates such as conflicts, disasters,
blackouts, and even track the movements
of vessels. And so over the next few
minutes, I'm going to show you how to
find NASA nightlights data, how to use
it, and all the while looking at world
events in Ukraine, Gaza, Turkey, and
North Korea, all from above, all at
night.
Hi everyone, I'm Dan and welcome back to
my channel on opensource investigations.
If you want to follow along in this
tutorial, please check out the links in
the description below. And while you're
there, don't forget to subscribe, like,
and share with a colleague or friend
that might be interested in this.
Otherwise, let's get into it. to simply
get to the tool that we're going to look
at today. You can find the link in the
description below or you can easily type
in NASA World View. When you get to NASA
Worldview, you're going to be greeted
with a little bit of a panel that shows
you a lot of different selections of
data. You can look at land surface
disturbance,
uh, surface water extent, things like
satellite detections of fire, but the
ones that we're going to look at is
nightlights from NASA's Black Marble.
There's a little tutorial over on the
right that just basically guides you
through some of the case studies and a
couple of definitions around what you
might actually be looking at, but we're
going to go through some of those in a
bit. This is exactly what you're going
to be looking at. On the left, there
will be a panel under the world view tab
that gives you the layers that you'll be
looking at on your map. And then down on
the bottom, you've got the daily imagery
viewer, and it allows you to scroll
along and view the data every single
day. Of course, some days might be
cloudy, so you'll often have to navigate
through until you find a day that isn't
so cloudy. If you'd like to look for
other forms of black marble data, what
you can do is click on add layers, go up
to the top here, and simply type in
black marble, and you'll see there's
actually quite a fair bit. Make sure
you've got the black marble nighttime
blue yellow composite one. selected as
well as some of these others that you
can play around with. I like the blue
yellow composite because it just gives a
clearer indication as to some of the
nightlight spots and allows you to
really identify things a little bit more
clearly such as if you're looking for
vessels or flash points or other things
like fires or things during conflicts.
So, what we're going to do is go through
a couple of different case studies
specifically starting with Ukraine.
I'm going to head over to the
coordinates for Ukraine's Madupole and
we're going to view this one here. So,
in early 2022, many of Ukraine's cities
went dark. And using black marble, what
we're going to do is have a look and see
what impact from the nightlights
Russia's full-scale invasion had on
Ukraine. What I'm going to do is click
on this option here called Start
Comparison. And this will bring up
different windows allowing us to view
two different dates with a slider in
between. I want to have a previous date
and we're going to have a look at
Mattupole from January 31, 20122. And
then I'm going to look at a date a
little bit later. Now I want to scroll
along a bit so that I can make sure I
have a date that has less clouds on it.
And as you can see when I scroll along
here where we have Matt upole in the
center here, when I scroll along from
January 2022 into May 2022, we can see
that according to the light data, it
almost disappears off the map. Now, if I
have a little bit of a look further on
from May 22, any other date I look at
barely has any indications of light data
whatsoever for Madub. If we zoom out a
little bit further, it gives us an
indication as to what other cities might
have looked like as well. You can see
that when I use the slider, there's much
less light coverage across Ukraine. If
we have a look at gear, for example, the
before of January 2022 and the after of
March 2022 shows significantly less
light emissions from Kiev in March than
what it did in January. And it just goes
to show the impact that that full-scale
invasion had. Of course, there's a
number of reasons as to why this might
have happened, such as light camouflage,
less power supply, and we can see that
in some of the later dates where there's
less power emissions and less lights or
other things. So, it's always good to
take this information in context with
what's happening on the ground. Another
location that we can see the impact
through NASA's nightlights data is in
Gaza. If we have a look at data from
before October 2023,
we can see quite a lot of strong light
emissions from this area in Gaza. Again,
if I bring up the comparison function
and I'll move my A tab, which is the
left side of the screen, across to
there. And then if I move my B tab
into, say, for example, November, which
is after October, we can see a complete
disappearance in the nightlight data.
One thing I recommend when looking at
this is just to confirm any anomalies
that might happen in the data is to
click on other dates to make sure that
either the disappearance or the
appearance of nightlights data is
constant throughout those dates. And
that helps you just get a little bit
more confidence in the data so that
you're not misreading any of the
information. Again, we can't draw
assumptions as to exactly why that's
happened, but obviously the extreme
bombardment of Gaza coupled with the
lack of fuel and electricity for
generators and other things like that
decreases the chance for any potential
of light emissions coming out of Gaza at
nighttime. The nightlight is not just
useful for conflicts, but also for
disaster and humanitarian relief. For
example, if we look at the February 2023
earthquake that struck southern Turkey,
we can have a look at areas that might
have suffered blackouts. I'm currently
looking over this area in southern
Turkey. And we're going to do the
comparison function again, but this time
I'm going to use the A tab for data from
January 25. I'm going to use the B tab
to identify a date just after that when
the earthquake struck in early February.
But if I move the dates forward, we can
get an idea from February 8 as to what
this place like Antia actually looked
like. If we do a before and after, we
can see considerably less light
emissions there. This is extremely
important because this blackout happened
during those earthquakes indicating a
lack of power supply to this area which
is shown through those light emissions
at nighttime. A good example of the lack
of power indicating a lack of
nightlights is if we have a look over
North Korea, you can see quite a sparse
area where there is significantly low
levels of nightlight emissions in
comparison to what would be over Soul in
South Korea. If we go back over those
days and try and find a less cloudy day,
you can very much see that this is
consistent throughout that time except
for places like Pyongyang, for example,
where we can see that patch of
nightlights data. But the clear
comparison can be seen along that border
there where there's almost a strict cut
of the nightlight data in comparison to
what we see in North Korea. Instead of
viewing the blue yellow composite, we
can also have a look at the black marble
sensor radiance which is the black and
white version. We're still looking over
North Korea. But one other interesting
function of looking at NASA's
nightlights data is the vessels. As you
can see, this is the land where North
Korea is and South Korea is. And here's
the ocean on both the right and also the
middle in the Yellow Sea. And you can
identify the number of vessels in that
area. It's nice to view both different
types of both blue and yellow composite
as well as the black and white version
to see the difference in that data and
to also view that data over time. And we
can see those vessels moving around
quite frequently there. Sometimes
obviously that's obscured by cloud
cover, but it makes for a very
interesting appearance just to view the
habits of those vessels as they're in
that water. Equally on the other side of
here, specifically around some of the
bays of North Korea where we can see
some of those vessels moving around. One
of the functions of this viewer that I
always find quite interesting is setting
up animations to watch this data over
the days that it's captured. For
example, we can make an animation to
show one day increments from 2025 July
to September 2025 and just see what that
looks like. Note in this central area
around the Korea straight where we can
see those vessels moving backwards and
forwards around the bottom of South
Korea and see large groups of vessels
moving around that area which shows a
significant pattern of movements of
vessels, maritime trade and other
indications and just goes to show how
powerful this free tool can actually be
in making significant findings just by
looking at the power of light on the
earth's surface at nighttime. I hope you
enjoyed this session on looking at the
world's activities from space at night
by looking at the light data available
through NASA's worldview system which is
freely available and open to anyone with
an internet connection and computer. And
if you did enjoy it, please share it
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