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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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.
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.
Is this map an updated 2016 map?
The map is from a 2016 paper, which was based on data collected in 2013 and 2014.