Lights from Nigeria
Abstract
The lights at night recorded by satellite imagery are due primarily to city lights and secondarily to the flaring of natural gas. In this report, the flaring is measured across time, with the hypothesis that the areas relatively closer to the constructed fuel pipeline experience a diminishing in earth night lights. The reasoning is that this diminishing is due to natural gas being shipped out of the vicinity via the pipeline, as an alternative to igniting them. To run the experiment, the time and place chosen was Nigeria with its pipeline system from 2010 to 2011. The result was a linear relationship to be found between the light detected and the distance of the flaring from the pipeline locations. At the end of this report the limitations and assumptions of this study are discussed.
Techniques involved
- Geo-referencing of printed pipeline maps,
- Euclidean distance computation,
- OLS regression on spatial data.
Data: NOAA; 2010 satellite Earth at Night images
University: Graduate School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego
Course: Geographic Information Systems for the Social Sciences
Faculty: Gordon McCord
Date: December 18, 2014