While numerous studies have focused on modeling car ownership as well as its relationship with various influential factors, there have been few empirical investigations into the relationship between nighttime light brightness and car ownership. Remotely sensed nighttime light (NTL) data can measure nocturnal artificial lighting on Earth's surface, and have been widely used to study urban change. Therefore, this study was set out to explore potential relationship between nighttime light data and car ownership time series. Based on nighttime light data and car ownership data of 13 prefecture-level cities in Jiangsu province from 2004 to 2013, this study conducted correlation analysis and explored how and to what extent car ownership associates with nighttime light. It was found that there is a relatively good correlation between car ownership data and the number of lit pixels with digital number values more than 45 and less than 60 in the nighttime data.

CICTP