A study of urbanization in China based on regionalization using DMSP/OLS night light imagery

Urbanization has sprawled rapidly accompanying with transformation of the society, development of economy, increase of urban population and changes of landscape. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) has a unique capability to detect the nocturnal observation of artificial lighting which can reflect urbanization level. Most previous studies had focused on pattern of urbanization development in provincial scale. Also, we carried out study on urbanization of cities in China by using DMSP/OLS night light imagery. Different from the other studies, we introduced the Regionalization into the process of modeling. The results showed that there was significant linear relationship between urbanization level index and night light index and regionalization could greatly increase the strength of linear relationship between these two indices.