夜间灯光遥感对城市发展类动能与相似性评估

Urban development assessment is helpful for urban planning and urban development policies. Census, survey, and nighttime light remote sensing data have been widely used to measure the urban development in previous research. However, most studies only focused on the size of urban development in a specific period and few of them have simultaneously considered the size and speed of urban development. A model that considers both the size and speed of urban development is necessary for evaluating the level of urban development, which is a dynamic process. On the basis of the nighttime light data of Suomi NPP-VIIRS from 2012 to 2019, the nighttime light kinetic energy index is proposed to measure the kinetic energy of urban development by considering the size and speed of urban development. Then, the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm was utilized to measure the DTW distance using the nighttime light kinetic energy index. Finally, 328 cities in China were classified according to the DTW distance. Numerically, the nighttime light kinetic energy index in most cities increased significantly from 2013 to 2019, especially in the southeast coastal areas and central regions, and that in the northwest area has also increased greatly. In terms of spatial distribution, the original urban agglomerations composed of cities with high night-time lighting kinetic energy index values expanded from 2013 to 2019. The 328 cities were divided into five levels. The classified levels are more comprehensive and reasonable than the city rank released by First Finance in 2019. The Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration was taken an example to analyze the synergy of urban agglomeration development, revealing that Tongling, Chizhou, and other cities in Anhui province still has a weak connection with the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. The development of a hinterland city (such as Wuhu, Ma'anshan) is recommended to link these cities.