Dr. Miguel Román describes using Puerto Rico's long Christmas lighting season, which runs from Black Friday to the San Sebastian festivities in January, as a clean test case for validating the new satellite night-light data, since the island has no snow to confound bright light readings. Spotting the Christmas lights confirmed the instrument was working and revealed something unexpected: beyond bright metro areas, the data showed faint light from small rural communities that had been obscured by the glare of cities, which he describes as getting a new pair of glasses to see all of humanity at night, not just the big urban lights.
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Román frames Puerto Rico as personally significant, calling it home and describing its Christmas season as uniquely long.
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Snow at night is also very bright in satellite imagery, which is why Puerto Rico's snow-free Christmas lights made a cleaner test case than snowy regions.
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He connects this discovery to broader potential uses the team began to recognize, such as tracking energy access and disaster response.
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5:39And so the next thing is like, well, we're US agency. Let's go get Christmas. also found Christmas lights. >> Okay. >> And that brought me back to my home of Puerto Rico because >> we're very part of Puerto Rico if you don't know, but we our Christmas are the best Christmas >> longest Christmas ever. >> Yeah. Get in the comments if you disagree. >> Yes. Let me say, you know, starts at Brad Fridays, ends in January 20 with the San Sebastian festivities. And I felt that this was an opportunity to connect with these communities. and and that was amazing. I mean the other thing is we knew that we needed to
6:20do data filtering elsewhere because snow if you think of it a snow at night very bright too. So Puerto Rico doesn't have snow but still have Christmas. So again just like the desk find an easy case study turn out beautifully. So this map you could there's a Puerto Rican map also, right? And and at the time it began to sink in that we were looking at a GMA
Remote SensingEarth ObservationEnergy AccessOpen Data