Earth  ID: 4658

NASA's Black Marble night lights used to examine disaster recovery in Puerto Rico

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.
 

Used Elsewhere In


Visualization Credits

Kel Elkins (USRA): Lead Visualizer
Miguel Román (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Ellen T. Gray (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Producer
Matthew R. Radcliff (USRA): Producer
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

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https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4658

Data Used:
Suomi NPP/VIIRS also referred to as: VIIRS
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.

Keywords:
DLESE >> Atmospheric science
DLESE >> Natural hazards
SVS >> Night lights
GCMD >> Earth Science >> Atmosphere >> Atmospheric Phenomena >> Hurricanes
SVS >> Hyperwall
NASA Science >> Earth
NASA Earth Science Focus Areas >> Weather and Atmospheric Dynamics

GCMD keywords can be found on the Internet with the following citation: Olsen, L.M., G. Major, K. Shein, J. Scialdone, S. Ritz, T. Stevens, M. Morahan, A. Aleman, R. Vogel, S. Leicester, H. Weir, M. Meaux, S. Grebas, C.Solomon, M. Holland, T. Northcutt, R. A. Restrepo, R. Bilodeau, 2013. NASA/Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Earth Science Keywords. Version 8.0.0.0.0