U003-01
Battling COVID-19 from Space: Cross-Scale Changes in Urban Activity Captured by NASA's Black Marble Product Suite

Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 07:05
Eleanor C Stokes1,2, Miguel O Roman2, Ranjay Man Shrestha3, Zhuosen Wang4, Virginia L. Kalb1, Ian L Paynter5, Srija Chakraborty1,6 and Tom Oda7, (1)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, 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, (6)Arizona State University, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision System Engineering, Tempe, AZ, United States, (7)Goddard Earth Sciences Research and Technology, Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, United States
Abstract:
Since last December, the coronavirus pandemic has spread worldwide, with global infections tallying over 12.5 million. Governments have scrambled to respond to the pandemic, pursuing a variety of distancing strategies with the goal of lowering transmission rates. Millions of people have been homebound to avoid disease transmission in the most significant medical quarantine event in recorded history. A known side-effect and contentious tradeoff has been the impact on the social and economic vitality of cities and towns across the world.

To respond to and mitigate the cascading impacts of the pandemic, various stakeholder groups require detailed, timely, and accurate information to support decision making. Yet quantitative information about how COVID-19 mitigation strategies and directives have affected economic and social activities is largely unavailable in many regions. This kind of information is important for tracking the impacts of mitigation policies, for understanding public responses to health guidance, and for informing future strategies towards curtailing transmission.

Here, we discuss recent work by scientists at the Earth from Space Institute (EFSI) at USRA and NASA GSFC, funded by NASA’s Rapid Response Initiative, that aims to fill this gap. We use novel daily satellite nighttime lights intensity measurements from the NASA Black Marble Product Suite to derive consistent, globally-comparative measures of urban activity changes since the pandemic. Time-series decomposition methods are used to identify the timing, magnitude, and spatial distribution of changes of light intensity within urban areas related to COVID-19 measures.

Our research highlights the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of mitigation strategies in different countries, districts, and even within urban areas. In particular, we focus on 915 urban areas in predominantly Muslim countries, mapping changes in how the holy month of Ramadan was observed in 2020 as compared to previous years. During Ramadan, traditional communal religious practices were at odds with public health guidance for limiting the virus's spread. In some regions, this tension resulted in governments loosening restrictions, caving to public pressure, while in other regions strict curfews and physical distancing directives were bolstered.

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