jailcd2016038: Remote Sensing based Analysis on Spatial-Temporal Variationof Urbanization in Beiiing, China

Abstract

As China’s capital city, Beijing has become a world city after decades of development. The scale and process of urbanization here are remarkable so that it is necessary and meaningful to have a comprehensive investigation of the urbanization situation in Beijing. In addition, with the rapid development and widely applied in urban studies, the time series DMSP/OLS products (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/ Operational Linescan System) were put into use as a significant remote sensing tool in this study. The study was made up with two aspects: the official statistics and the remote sensing observing data. The official statistics contain two indicators: population and GDP; the night time light images from DMSP/OLS was applied to extract the land use change information by classifying of the image and the urbanization level with calculating the average value of digital number. After data processing, the correlation analysis and regression analysis between two data types were carried out to get a comprehensive understanding of the urbanization processing in the study area. The analysis results indicate that the DMSP/OLS based urbanization investigation result matches with the government statistical data at a pretty high level. The analysis in this paper came to a conclusion that the urbanization in Beijing is obvious and remarkable indeed from both official statistics and the remote sensing observing.