Nighttime Lights Trends in Ethiopia

Nighttime Lights Trends in Ethiopia#

This notebook provides an analysis on the temporal and spatial patterns of nighttime lights trends in Ethiopia from 2012 to 2024. The analysis includes visualizations of nighttime lights trends at national and regional levels.

Methodology#

We created a time series of weekly radiance using NASA’s Black Marble data which involves several steps, including data acquisition, pre-processing, zonal statistics calculation, and time series generation. The zonal statistics of the aggregated sum of nighttime lights is used to make inferences.

This notebook uses NASA’s Collection-2.

Insights#

National Trends of Nighttime Lights#

/Users/ssarva/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-WBG/Documents/ethiopia-economic-monitoring/.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py:3699: UserWarning: Automatically deduplicated selection parameter with identical configuration. If you want independent parameters, explicitly name them differently (e.g., name='param1', name='param2'). See https://github.com/vega/altair/issues/3891
  exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)

/Users/ssarva/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-WBG/Documents/ethiopia-economic-monitoring/.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py:3699: UserWarning: Automatically deduplicated selection parameter with identical configuration. If you want independent parameters, explicitly name them differently (e.g., name='param1', name='param2'). See https://github.com/vega/altair/issues/3891
  exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)

The Population and GDP of the country shows a similar increase as in NTL. However, the dips ain 2019 and 2019 and the rise in 2017 is not seen. The last available year for this data is also 2023.

/Users/ssarva/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-WBG/Documents/ethiopia-economic-monitoring/.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py:3699: UserWarning: Automatically deduplicated selection parameter with identical configuration. If you want independent parameters, explicitly name them differently (e.g., name='param1', name='param2'). See https://github.com/vega/altair/issues/3891
  exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)

All percentage change values consider 2019 as a baseline year. 2024 saw a reduction in lights compared to 2023

Percentage change in subnational annual nighttime lights compared to PY#

Not all admin regions saw an increase in NTL compared to 2019. Tigray region saw a reduction in lights since 2019. Afar and Benshangul-Gumaz saw little change in light from 2019.

Trends in subnational annual nighttime lights#

ntl_adm1_annual[ntl_adm1_annual['date']=='2025-01-01'].sort_values(by='percent_change_ntl_sum_PY')[['ADM1_EN','percent_change_ntl_sum_PY']]

	ADM1_EN	percent_change_ntl_sum_PY
185	Benishangul Gumz	0.332923
186	Dire Dawa	31.874354
183	Afar	33.434822
190	Sidama	33.443058
191	Somali	37.292412
184	Amhara	46.301948
193	Tigray	50.079379
189	Oromia	56.505519
195	Central Ethiopia	57.412203
194	South Ethiopia	60.856682
192	South West Ethiopia	65.308027
182	Addis Abeba	65.503396
187	Gambela	79.326613
188	Harari	92.657715

There was a considerable increase in light in Afar in 2017. Most other regions also saw an increase in light in that year. Somali and SNNR has shown a consistent rise in NTL. Tigray region saw a drop in NTL in 2022, potentially because of the war.