A Review of the Far-Reaching Usage of Low-Light Nighttime Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Please emphasize the publication time range (Is it only 2021? I remember 2011-2021 from the previous version) of the 1630 paper that you analyzed. 

The title of the publication is not clear. It might be also useful to mention the term “Review” in the title such as “A comprehensive review of …..”

Line 40: please explain how you find this papers. It will be useful if you mention about databases (WoS, Scopus etc.) and keywords that you used for your search.

‘The explanation for Figure 4 is not clear. Please expand it. The strategy behind performance and data categorization should be better explained.

Line 189. Picture should be image.

Line 193-194: please expand this sentence and make it clear if land use maps are generated or not.

Line 207: What do “these estimates” refer to?

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review our paper.  Your comments have helped us improve the clarity of the manuscript.

For each of your points:

1) Please emphasize the publication time range (Is it only 2021? I remember 2011-2021 from the previous version) of the 1630 paper that you analyzed. 

Actually, some of the papers in our database go back to the early DMSP era, in the 1970s!  I have added ‘from the 1970s’ in the abstract and the introduction.

 

2) The title of the publication is not clear. It might be also useful to mention the term “Review” in the title such as “A comprehensive review of …..”

We have changed the title to ‘A Review of the Far-Reaching Usage of Low-Light Nighttime Data’

 

3) Line 40: please explain how you find this papers. It will be useful if you mention about databases (WoS, Scopus etc.) and keywords that you used for your search.

We found these papers using key words in Google Scholar and looking through the references of some of the papers we found.  Neither WoS or Scopus was used.  I’ve added a phrase about the search in the section of the introduction you indicated, as well as a couple of sentences at the beginning of section 2.1

 

4) ‘The explanation for Figure 4 is not clear. Please expand it. The strategy behind performance and data categorization should be better explained.

We have changed the beginning of section 3.1 to ‘The Data and Performance category focused on assessments of the DNB-derived datasets and data quality/calibration, with its principle tags accounting for about 20% (326) of the total references up to and including 2021. A number of sub-tags stratify each of the principal tags into refined sub-categories. ‘   Hopefully that makes it clearer.

 

5) Line 189. Picture should be image.

For clarity, we changed ‘overall picture of’ to ‘aggregate of’

 

6) Line 193-194: please expand this sentence and make it clear if land use maps are generated or not.

There are over 140 references in the land pattern and uses category.  Many do generate or use maps, but not all of them.  Some use DNB data for a quality check on their new indexes.  We have expanded this sentence, but it’s difficult to say all references do a particular action.

7) Line 207: What do “these estimates” refer to?

We have changed ‘these estimates’ to ‘these estimates of various human activity metrics’ for clarity.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The paper has well revised according to my former comments. I think it is a good review for the scientific society of low-light remote sensing.

Author Response

Thank you for agreeing to review the revision and your helpful comments the first round.  We agree that this manuscript can serve as an important waypoint in the growing and evolving use of low-light visible observations.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors review the large variety of publications using low-light data of VIIRS/DNB and DMSP/OLS through 2021, ranging from social to natural science, from oceans to atmosphere, and biology to civil engineering. The paper looks interesting and is in high demand, but requires a minor revision before publication.

 

Detailed comments are below.

1.         P1 L6, the VIIRS payload has many different imaging spectral bands, and DNB is the one sensing low-light information among them. Maybe we should add the usage of DNB here, but VIIRS imager.

2.         P1 the first paragraph, the study is of significant importance to evaluate next-generation satellite architecture solutions. Maybe the beginning of Introduction should start with an emphasis on the satellite observation system itself. After illustrating the current situation, the authors then bring in the demand for this overview study.

3.         Concerning the fourth section of Discussion, the authors continue to illustrate the classification like Section 3, so I suggest the title of Section 4 should be replaced by something else, rather than Discussion. Section 4.5 on future geostationary satellites can still be included in Discussion.

4.         As a review paper, the number of references listed seems too small.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting topic for a review article. However, the number of references is not sufficient for a review. Authors should conduct a better literature analysis. When I searched for VIIRS in WoS, I saw several articles which were not included in this article. Therefore, I strongly suggest to revise the manuscript by conducting a deeper literature analysis.

Some important literature:

Chen H, Sun C, Xiong X, Sarid G, Sun J. SNPP VIIRS Day Night Band: Ten Years of On-Orbit Calibration and Performance. Remote Sensing. 2021; 13(20):4179. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13204179

Sun J, Xiong X, Lei N, Li S, Twedt K, Angal A. Ten Years of SNPP VIIRS Reflective Solar Bands On-Orbit Calibration and Performance. Remote Sensing. 2021; 13(15):2944.  https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13152944.

Elvidge CD, Zhizhin M, Ghosh T, Hsu F-C, Taneja J. Annual Time Series of Global VIIRS Nighttime Lights Derived from Monthly Averages: 2012 to 2019. Remote Sensing. 2021; 13(5):922. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13050922

General:

Please use references for the first and second paragraph of the introduction. You should better explain the need for such review paper. Authors should better focus on the accepted international databases (WoS) and better explain their selection criteria. Methodology section of this manuscript needs improvement by checking some other review articles.

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

In my opinion, the present paper it does not fit the theme of the Remote Sensing journal, it does not offer any novelty to the readers about using Nighttime Light Data. The paper would have been interesting if offers various approaches of the authors about methodology, data processing, validation, limitation etc. by using Nighttime Data throughout time.