Quantitative Association between Nighttime Lights and Geo-Tagged Human Activity Dynamics during Typhoon Mangkhut

Abstract

The daily nighttime lights (NTL) and the amount of location-service requests (NLR) data have been widely used as a proxy for measures of disaster-induced power outages and geo-tagged human activity dynamics. However, the association between the two datasets is not well understood. In this study, we investigated how the NTL signals and geo-tagged human activities changed in response to Typhoon Mangkhut. The confusion matrix is constructed to quantify the changes of the NLR in response to Typhoon Mangkhut, as well as the changes of the NTL signals at the grid level. Geographically-weighted regression and quantile regression were used to examine the associations between the changes of the NTL and the NLR at both grid and county levels. The quantile regressions were also used to quantify the relationships between the dimmed NTL signals and the change of the NLR in disaster damage estimates at the county level. Results show that the percent of the grids with anomalous human activities is significantly correlated with the nearby air pressure and wind speed. Geo-tagged human activities varied in response to the evolution of Mangkhut with significant areal differentiation. Over 69.3% of the grids with significant human activity change is also characterized by declined NTL brightness, which is closely associated with abnormal human activities. Significant log-linear and moderate positive correlations were found between the changes of the NTL and NLR at both the grid and county levels, as well as between the county-level changes of NLR/NTL and the damage estimates. This study shows the geo-tagged human activities are closely associated with the changes of the daily NTL signals in response to Typhoon Mangkhut. The two datasets are complimentary in sensing the typhoon-induced losses and damages.

Keywords

• NPP-VIIRS DNB
• social media
• natural disaster
• typhoon
• damage assessment