Transformative Urban Changes of Beijing in the Decade of the 2000s
by
Alessandro Sorichetta 1,*
, Son V. Nghiem 2,*, Marco Masetti 3, Catherine Linard 4 and Andreas Richter 5
Alessandro Sorichetta 1,*, Son V. Nghiem 2,*, Marco Masetti 3, Catherine Linard 4 and Andreas Richter 5
1
WorldPop, School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
2
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, MS 300-235, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
3
Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra “A. Desio”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Luigi Mangiagalli, 34, 20133 Milan, Italy
4
Department of Geography, Université de Namur, rue de Bruxelles 61, B-5000 Namur, Belgium
5
Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen, Otto-Hahn-Allee 1, D-28359 Bremen, Germany
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2020, 12(4), 652; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12040652
Received: 11 January 2020 / Revised: 7 February 2020 / Accepted: 11 February 2020 / Published: 16 February 2020
(This article belongs to the Section Urban Remote Sensing)
The rapid economic growth, the exodus from rural to urban areas, and the associated extreme urban development that occurred in China in the decade of the 2000s have severely impacted the environment in Beijing, its vicinity, and beyond. This article presents an innovative approach for assessing mega-urban changes and their impact on the environment based on the use of decadal QuikSCAT (QSCAT) satellite data, acquired globally by the SeaWinds scatterometer over that period. The Dense Sampling Method (DSM) is applied to QSCAT data to obtain reliable annual infrastructure-based urban observations at a posting of ~1 km. The DSM-QSCAT data, along with different DSM-based change indices, were used to delineate the extent of the Beijing infrastructure-based urban area in each year between 2000 and 2009, and assess its development over time, enabling a physical quantification of its urbanization which reflects the implementation of various development policies during the same time period. Eventually, as a proxy for the impact of Beijing urbanization on the environment, the decadal trend of its infrastructure-based urbanization is compared with that of the corresponding tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) column densities as observed from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) instrument aboard the second European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-2) between 2000 and 2002, and from the SCanning Imaging Absorption SpectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY aboard of the ESA’s ENVIronmental SATellite (SCIAMACHY /ENVISAT) between 2003 and 2009. Results reveal a threefold increase of the yearly tropospheric NO2 column density within the Beijing infrastructure-based urban area extent in 2009, which had quadrupled since 2000.
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Externally hosted supplementary file 1
Doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.11576715.v3
Link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11576715.v3
Description: The DSM_QSCAT_data for Beijing, representing annual infrastructure-based urban observations at a posting of ~1 km, are obtained by applying the Dense Sampling Method [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-36699-9] to Level L1B Ku-Band QuikSCAT satellite data [https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/QSCAT_LEVEL_1B_V2] which were continuously collected between July 19th, 1999 and November 22nd, 2009 by the SeaWinds scatterometer. The GOME_SCI_data for Beijing, representing tropospheric NO2 column densities averaged annually and posted approximately 14 km, are derived from GOME [http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1999)056<0151:TGOMEG>2.0.CO;2] and SCIAMACHY [http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1999)056<0127:SMOAMM>2.0.CO;2] satellite observations acquired between 2000–2002 and 2003–2009 [https://doi.org/10.1038/nature040927l], respectively. Figure S1 allows to visually compare annual DSM-based urban area extents against the corresponding intercalibrated stable night light data [https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2016.2572724] for each year in the 2000s.
MDPI and ACS Style
Sorichetta, A.; Nghiem, S.V.; Masetti, M.; Linard, C.; Richter, A. Transformative Urban Changes of Beijing in the Decade of the 2000s. Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 652.
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