NASA's Black Marble night lights used to examine disaster recovery in Puerto Rico
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- Visualizations by:
- Kel Elkins
- View full credits
At night, Earth is lit up in bright strings of roads dotted with pearl-like cities and towns as human-made artificial light takes center stage. During Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico's lights went out.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, research physical scientist Miguel Román at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues combined NASA's Black Marble night lights data product from the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite with USGS-NASA Landsat data and Google's OpenStreetMap to develop a neighborhood-scale map of energy use in communities across Puerto Rico as the electricity grid was slowly restored. They then analyzed the relationship between restoration rates in terms of days without electricity and the remoteness of communities from major cities.
This visualization starts with a global view of hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico. We then zoom in to Puerto Rico to compare the standard night lights dataset to a new, high definition version of nights lights. After the hurricane passes over the island, we see a massive drop in night light intensity due to loss of power. After showing night light levels over several stages of hurricane recovery, we transition to a 'Days Without Power' dataset. The camera then zooms in to several locations around the island to examine each stage of recovery in more detail.
This visualization starts with a global view of hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico. We then zoom in to Puerto Rico to compare the standard night lights dataset to a new, high definition version of nights lights. After the hurricane passes over the island, we see a massive drop in night light intensity due to loss of power. After showing night light levels over several stages of hurricane recovery, we transition to a 'Days Without Power' dataset. The camera then zooms in to several locations around the island to examine each stage of recovery in more detail. This version has no legend/labels.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Kel Elkins (USRA) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Miguel Román (USRA)
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Producers
- Ellen T. Gray (NASA/HQ)
- Matthew Radcliff (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Datasets used in this visualization
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Suomi NPP VIIRS
ID: 722
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.