Light Pollution Map

A few weeks ago, The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness was published in Science Advances. The article is a report on artificial sky radiance, a current update to previous data. The supplement to the article is a light pollution map. Since I didn’t like the quality of the CIRES web visualization of the data, I decided to create a vectorized version. As the GeoTIFF source map isn’t publically available, I used the provided KMZ preview as a starting point. After extracting and assembling the JPEG tiles, I used a bilateral filter and other processing to remove the compression artifacts and convert the image into a usable state. I then used GDAL to apply coordinate information to the image and used makesurface and tippecanoe to create vector tiles of the map. Finally, I visualized the data using the Mapbox Dark style.

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4 Responses to Light Pollution Map

  1. Yannick LEAUTE says:

    Hello,
    I am really interested in using this map since the original authors do not share their high resolution map freely. Would you be willing to share the vector tiles of the map you have created?
    Thank you.

    • Matthew Petroff says:

      As the licensing (“non-commercial”) is somewhat unclear, I don’t want to redistribute anything. Sorry.

      The vector tiles weren’t made from the original high resolution map anyway; they were made from the freely available KMZ preview.

  2. Mark says:

    Is this map an updated 2016 map?

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