7.22.2007

manila by night



Google Earth has released several new layers, among them NASA sourced content including Earth By Night.

Seeing the human generated lights on the night time hemispheres is not only beautiful, but they also reveal the urbanization patterns across the landscape. (They also show how much light pollution we generate.) The screencap above shows how the megamanila urbanized region stretches from Clark in the North to Batangas City in the South along very strong corridors. It also shows the Metro Manila westward to reach Subic. You can also see how the corridor between the shores of the Laguna de Bai and Taal Lake are rapidly urbanizing -and will soon approximate the density you see between the Manila Bay and Laguna lake.

Additional images from Google reveal how Naga City is growing into Legaspi City. This one shows the cities of Cebu, Bacolod, and Iloilo. And this one Davao and GenSan.

With a little map algebra, you could deduce the relative density levels between those urbanized areas using the images. With a time sequence, you could also show the direction and intensity of the pace of urbanization.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might be interested to see these two posts of mine way back: "Manila from Space at Night" and Revisiting Manila from Space at Night. :-)

Urbano dela Cruz said...

thanks for the links eugene. and great work on the overlay.

did you ever request for the high res download?

Anonymous said...

Nope. This was a NASA picture which was taken, I think, from the International Space Station. I don't think it's part of the Google Earth dataset, but is included with the NASA archives.

Urbano dela Cruz said...

Yes. I know.

This link from your later post led to an ISS repository of images. There was an option to request for a high res download.

Anonymous said...

Sorry. I got confused. Yep, I now remember requesting the hi-res image. That's what I used to create the annotated image.

Hmmm... I can't find the original Photoshop file I used. :(

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