New Methods for Understanding Intra-urban Contours at a Global Scale: An Application of Dense Sampling Methods of QuikSCAT Scatterometer with Population and Housing Data

A global and consistent characterization of land use and land change in urban and suburban environments are crucial for many fundamental social and economic science studies and applications. Here, we present for the first time a dense sampling method (DSM) that uses satellite scatterometer data at a coarse resolution (~12 km) to delineate urban and intra-urban areas at a much higher resolution (~1 km). The trade-off is that the daily or near daily temporal resolution is reduced to yearly or multi-year time scale, which is still appropriate to map urban areas and to identify interannual changes in most cases. The DSM results will be analyzed together with information on population and housing censuses, with Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) of moderate and high spatial resolution optical satellite imagery, and with both DMSP night lights.