Detailed caption and bio forthcoming.The Gulf at Night, 1992-2003
This image is a composite of night light brightness around the Persian/Arabian Gulf and southeastern Arabian Peninsula
from three different dates: Blue=1992, Green=1997, and Red=2003. Each date corresponds to a different color channel,
so the composite color shows the relative brightness at each time. Areas equally brightly lit at all three times would ap-
pear white. Areas much brighter in any one of the years would appear closer to the color corresponding to that year.
Areas brighter at two out of three times would appear as the additive color of those years (e.g. Red+Green=Yellow,
so yellow areas were more brightly lit post-1992). Prominent features include Qatar and the United Arab Emirates,
the Batina Coast of northeast Oman and a number of oil and gas production facilities in the Gulf and on the edge of
the Rub al-Khali in Oman.
Many thanks to Christopher Small of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory for producing and
providing this image as well as the caption explaining it. More detail on night light composite imagery and its analysis
can be found in C.D. Elvidge, Francesca Pozzi, and Christopher Small, “Spatial analysis of global urban extent from
DMSP-OLS night lights,” Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol. 96, No. 3-4 (June 2005), pp. 277-291. Acknowledgement also
goes to Chris Elvidge of the National Geophysical Data Center and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program for
producing the data which made such images possible. Night light date and other datasets of interest are available to
the public at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/dmsp.html.