Rishabh Srivastava | Loki.

ai | @rishdotblog

S AT E L L I T E I M A G E R Y F O R T R A C K I N G
ECONOMIC CHANGE
Slides at https://rish.blog/sat
OVERVIEW

A. Why use satellite data

B. How to use satellite data

C. Drawbacks and limitations of using satellite data to

estimate growth
 A . W H Y U S E S AT E L L I T E D ATA ?

WESTERN DELHI, INDIA

Use-Case

• Todd, a financial analyst

specialising in the
construction industry

• Wants to identify fast

growing cities (in terms of
infrastructure) in Asia
Objective
Estimate relative infrastructure growth rates
across provinces in Asia
Challenges

1. Few “official” metrics for measuring granular growth

2. The ones that do exist (like province GDP) often

cannot be compared across countries

3. Even when available, official figures are unreliable

4. Figures in developing countries can come with a

massive (up to 18 months) time-lag
Solution characteristics

1. Reliable and impervious to manipulation

2. Regularly updated

3. Relatively inexpensive or free

Solution:
Satellite
Imagery!

• Free sources:

• NOAA Nightlight Data

(updated daily)

• Sentinel-2 Data
(updated every 5 days)

• Paid sources (not covered

in this talk)
B . H O W T O U S E S AT E L L I T E D ATA ?
NIGHTLIGHT
D ATA

• An effective proxy for

economic growth in
developing countries

• Produced by NOAA (USA)

• Updated daily, free to use

Accessing the
Data

• Data available as raster (GeoTiff)

files, where each pixel
represents the brightness (in
nanoWatts/cm2/sr) of a roughly
450m x 450m area

• Files can be read by Python rasterio

(with GDAL doing the heavy
lifting), using the rasterio library rasterstats
• The rasterstats library can be
used to calculate summary
statistics for different areas in a
shapefile
Computing
summary stats

• You can convert a raster to

a CSV file with average
luminosity in predefined
areas using literally 10 lines
of code

• Shapefile (which is a
machine readable map) of
a region needed for this
Example for Singapore
Water reservoirs

Central
Business
District
Measuring changes over
time

• CSVs generated for each

time-unit can be used to
track changes in average
nightlight intensity over
time

• Significant seasonal
variations can exist

• Interactive version for

Indian districts: https://
embed.loki.ai/nightlight/
INTERACTIVE VERSION: HTTPS://EMBED.LOKI.AI/NIGHTLIGHT/ASIA.HTML

Growth of nightlight intensity in

Asia from 2013-2018
SENTINEL-2
S AT E L L I T E
I M A G E RY
• Measures reflected solar
radiation across 13-bands of
wavelength (3 of which are
RGB)

• 1 pixel represents 10m x 10m

• Produced by the European

Space Agency

• Updated roughly every 5

days, free to use
Accessing the
Data

• Rasters can be
downloaded from the
ESA’s Sentinelhub, or from
a Google Cloud Storage /
Amazon S3 bucket
Different bands capture different
wavelengths of light
Central Resolution
Sentinel-2 Bands
Wavelength (Nm) (M)

Band 1 - Coastal Aerosol 443 60

Band 2 - Blue 490 10

Band 3 - Green 560 10
Band 4 - Red 665 10
Band 5 - Vegetation Red Edge 705 20
Band 6 - Vegetation Red Edge 740 20
Band 7 - Vegetation Red Edge 783 20
Band 8 - Near Infra-Red 842 10
Band 8A - Vegetation Red Edge 865 20
Band 9 - Water Vapour 945 60
Band 10 - Short-Wave Infra Red 1375 60
Band 11 - Short-Wave Infra Red 1610 20
Band 12 - Short-Wave Infra Red 2190 20
Processing the data

• Different bands can be combined to get meaningful

metrics — like amount of built-up area in a city, amount
of green space etc

• For instance, roads and buildings tend to absorb more

infra-red light (heat) and reflect more visible light
(specially in the blue spectrum)

• A simple, “built-up” index that is commonly used is

(Blue-NIR)/(Blue+NIR). Note: areas with water tend to
also have a high built-up index
Tr u e - C o l o r i m a g e o n l e f t , b u i l t - u p i n d e x b a s e d
image on right (darker = more built-up area)
Built-up area by region in Singapore
(darker areas= more builtup)
Quantifying
change over time

• Changes in built-up
indices can be computed
over time. Extremely
effective at the micro-scale
C h a n g e i n H o C h i M i n h C i t y ’s D i s t r i c t
2 over time
Change Map
Feb, 2019 Jan, 2016 (Red= more built)
C h a n g e i n H o C h i M i n h C i t y ’s D i s t r i c t
2 over time
Change Map
Feb, 2019 Jan, 2016 (Red= more built)
C h a n g e i n H o C h i M i n h C i t y ’s D i s t r i c t
2 over time
Change Map
Feb, 2019 Jan, 2016 (Red= more built)
C . L I M I TAT I O N S A N D C AV E AT S

CLOUDS OVER SINGAPORE

Key
Drawbacks

• Cloud-cover makes using

satellite imagery far more
difficult

• Extreme haze in India and

China can cause nightlight
and index-based approaches
to go awry

• Algorithm can sometimes

think that water-logged
neighbourhoods are highly
built-up
Limitations

• Growth due to non-

infrastructure factors (like
Finance or Software) not
measured through satellites

• Assumes that increase in

supply of infrastructure,
nightlights, and buildings =
growth. Not always the case
(Japanese Roads to
Nowhere)
 Questions?

Rishabh Srivastava
rishabh@loki.ai | loki.ai
@rishdotblog