The Night Light Development Index (NLDI): a spatially explicit measure of human development from satellite data C. D. Elvidge 1, K. E. Baugh 2, S. J. Anderson 2,3, P. C. Sutton 3, and T. Ghosh 2 1 NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Boulder, Colorado, USA 2 Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA The growing popularity of these data reflects either the absence, or the presumed inaccuracy, of more conventional economic statistics, like national or regional GDP. The NGDC Earth Observation Group (EOG) started working with DMSP7 data in 1994 and has since then produced annual, cloud-free composites of nighttime lights.8 The theoretical background of "remote sensing" goes back to Measuring Economic Growth From Outer Space Nighttime Lights | Earthdata Modified 7 years, 7 months ago. Satellite night-lights data are a useful proxy for economic activity at temporal and geographic scales for which traditional data are of poor quality or are unavailable. NASA has developed the Black Marble, a daily calibrated, corrected, and validated product suite, so . The use and popularization of night light data in economics allowed researchers to, for the first time, measure growth for sub-national regions across the globe, even in countries with poor national accounts data. This is a plotting issue, and not a problem with the satellite or the data. An examination of North American light emissions shows a roughly six percent annual increase from 1947 to 2000 . graphing, mapping and clustering regional data. Important Note from the source website: "The Earth Observations Group (EOG) at NOAA/NCEI is producing a version 1 pack of average radiance composite graphics using nighttime data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB).. Before averaging, the DNB information is filtered to exclude data influenced by stray light, lightning, lunar illumination, and cloud .