Nighttime artificial light intensity in local climate zones: A comparative study for global cities

Introduction These archives contain data and results used in the submitted manuscript titled "Urban light pollution in local climate zones: a comparative study for global cities". There are several (sub)folders with various data. A. Archive results-LCZs.zip 1) 01_Abs-values: Absolute values of the nighttime radiance (NTR) in delineated local climate zones preceded by an R script in PNG and SVG format (boxplots). 2) 02_Differences: Absolute and relative differences of the nighttime radiance (NTR) between the analyzed years and the reference year 2012. Outputs were produced by an R script as boxplots in PNG and SVG format. Note that some relative differences should be misleading (e.g., in the case of very small values of NTR, the relative increase can be enormous). 3) 03_Cities: Individual results for all the cities, including all boxplots, GIS layers (GeoTiff), maps (PNG), and tables (CSV). Some cities have a different name than was used in the manuscript (e.g., Duisburg-Dortmund vs. Ruhr Region). Part of this folder is also the LCZ layer. B. Archive CityAreas.zip A set of 32 metropolitan areas was selected using the population ranking for individual continents. The spatial extent of these areas was based on the Global urban and rural settlement dataset (Liu et al., 2024). The second step was evaluation using the first version of the Global Urban Polygons and Points Dataset (GUPPD)(CEISIN Columbia University and JRC European Commission, 2024). Finally, each selected polygon extent was extended manually about its surroundings, using satellite images, to consider the effects of (sub-) urbanisation. C. Archive results-Cities-CorrPlots.zip The difference between the zones was tested using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Tukey HSD test. Evaluating the Tukey HSD test, the difference between individual classes was used as a 'hit' indicator in the correlation matrix ('hit' means statistically significant difference). In most cases, 'hits' were identified in the majority of the LCZ combinations. Note that the number of grid cells for each LCZ needs to be considered. D. Archive results-table-LP_2012-2023.zip Aggregated table for all the analyzed cities. It contains the following columns: LCZ_code (Integer) with the code of the grid's LCZ, City (String) name, Group (String), and Y2012 (up to Y2023)(Decimal) with NTR values. Note that the first two rows are identical; it is not an error (the surface is practically the same).