U012-07
Tracking Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic using NASA's Black Marble Product Suite

Thursday, 10 December 2020: 11:08
Miguel O Roman1, Eleanor C Stokes2, Ranjay Man Shrestha3, Zhuosen Wang4, Virginia L. Kalb2, Ian L Paynter5, Srija Chakraborty2 and Tomohiro Oda1, (1)Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Terrestrial Information Systems Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)University of Maryland, College Park, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, College Park, MD, United States, (5)University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, United States
Abstract:
As part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Rapid Response and Novel Research in Earth Science (RRNES) initiative, scientists at Universities Space Research Association (USRA) Earth from Space Institute (EfSI) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are making use of NASA’s Black Marble global nighttime lights product suite to assess the social, economic, and cascading impacts of COVID-19 and other events, and the effectiveness of actions taken at community, national, regional, and global levels to mitigate their adverse effects and build greater resilience through response measures.

Nightlights data are collected by the Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) on the Suomi-National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) platform, a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA satellite. This rapid response effort includes algorithm refinements for enhanced science data processing and visualization of low-light visible imagery across a global sample of urban areas. The refinements also include additional lunar illumination corrections, improved nighttime cloud masking, and the fusion of Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 data to increase spatial, temporal, and multi-angular coverage. The project is also leveraging Machine Learning (ML) techniques for seasonal-adjustment of the VIIRS DNB time series data.

Spatially-explicit monitoring, available in near-real time at the street level, is essential for identifying where to send aid, and for understanding distributional impacts – specifically "who" has been most affected and "what" is the capacity of the affected communities to cope. Accordingly, additional time series metrics and fine resolution visualizations -- based on both the daily 500-meter (VNP46A2) and monthly 30-meter Black Marble High Definition (HD) nighttime light products -- are being investigated to help characterize sub-neighborhood variations resulting from quarantining and social-distancing measures.

NASA’s Black Marble products are routinely made available via the tri-agency COVID-19 Dashboard (EODashboard[dot]org), a concerted effort between the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and NASA. All data are calibrated daily, corrected, and validated with independent measurements for science-ready analysis.

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