The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought drastic changes to people’s daily lives, work, and the surrounding environment. Investigations into these changes are very important for decision makers to implement policies on economic loss assessments and stimulation packages, city reopening, resilience of the environment, and arrangement of medical resources. In order to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on people’s lives, activities, and the natural environment, this paper investigates the spatial and temporal characteristics of Nighttime Light (NTL) radiance and Air Quality Index (AQI) before and during the pandemic in mainland China. The monthly mean NTL radiance, and daily and monthly mean AQI are calculated over mainland China and compared before and during the pandemic. Our results show that the monthly average NTL brightness is much lower during the quarantine period than before. This study categorizes NTL into three classes: residential area, transportation, and public facilities and commercial centers, with NTL radiance ranges of 5–20, 20–40 and greater than 40 (nW· ${\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}$ · ${\mathrm{sr}}^{-1}$ ), respectively. We found that the Number of Pixels (NOP) with NTL detection increased in the residential area and decreased in the commercial centers for most of the provinces after the shutdown, while transportation and public facilities generally stayed the same. More specifically, we examined these factors in Wuhan, where the first confirmed cases were reported, and where the earliest quarantine measures were taken. Observations and analysis of pixels associated with commercial centers were observed to have lower NTL radiance values, indicating a dimming behavior, while residential area pixels recorded increased levels of brightness after the beginning of the lockdown. The study also discovered a significant decreasing trend in the daily average AQI for mainland China from January to March 2020, with cleaner air in most provinces during February and March, compared to January 2020. In conclusion, the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 has had a crucial impact on people’s daily lives and activity ranges through the increased implementation of lockdown and quarantine policies. On the other hand, the air quality of mainland China has improved with the reduction in non-essential industries and motor vehicle usage. This evidence demonstrates that the Chinese government has executed very stringent quarantine policies to deal with the pandemic. The decisive response to control the spread of COVID-19 provides a reference for other parts of the world.

The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., India, Russia, and Brazil. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implementation strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, human mobility, environmental impact, socioeconomical impact; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.

Precipitation, especially convective precipitation, is highly associated with hydrological disasters (e.g., floods and drought) that have negative impacts on agricultural productivity, society, and the environment. To mitigate these negative impacts, it is crucial to monitor the precipitation status in real time. The new Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the GOES-16 satellite provides such a precipitation product in higher spatiotemporal and spectral resolutions, especially during the daytime. This research proposes a deep neural network (DNN) method to classify rainy and non-rainy clouds based on the brightness temperature differences (BTDs) and reflectances (Ref) derived from ABI. Convective and stratiform rain clouds are also separated using similar spectral parameters expressing the characteristics of cloud properties. The precipitation events used for training and validation are obtained from the IMERG V05B data, covering the southeastern coast of the U.S. during the 2018 rainy season. The performance of the proposed method is compared with traditional machine learning methods, including support vector machines (SVMs) and random forest (RF). For rainy area detection, the DNN method outperformed the other methods, with a critical success index (CSI) of 0.71 and a probability of detection (POD) of 0.86. For convective precipitation delineation, the DNN models also show a better performance, with a CSI of 0.58 and POD of 0.72. This automatic cloud classification system could be deployed for extreme rainfall event detection, real-time forecasting, and decision-making support in rainfall-related disasters.

In 2019, COVID-19 quickly spread across the world, infecting billions of people and disrupting the normal lives of citizens in every country. Governments, organizations, and research institutions all over the world are dedicating vast resources to research effective strategies to fight this rapidly propagating virus. With virus testing, most countries publish the number of confirmed cases, dead cases, recovered cases, and locations routinely through various channels and forms. This important data source has enabled researchers worldwide to perform different COVID-19 scientific studies, such as modeling this virus’s spreading patterns, developing prevention strategies, and studying the impact of COVID-19 on other aspects of society. However, one major challenge is that there is no standardized, updated, and high-quality data product that covers COVID-19 cases data internationally. This is because different countries may publish their data in unique channels, formats, and time intervals, which hinders researchers from fetching necessary COVID-19 datasets effectively, especially for fine-scale studies. Although existing solutions such as John’s Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard and 1point3acres COVID-19 tracker are widely used, it is difficult for users to access their original dataset and customize those data to meet specific requirements in categories, data structure, and data source selection. To address this challenge, we developed a toolset using cloud-based web scraping to extract, refine, unify, and store COVID-19 cases data at multiple scales for all available countries around the world automatically. The toolset then publishes the data for public access in an effective manner, which could offer users a real time COVID-19 dynamic dataset with a global view. Two case studies are presented about how to utilize the datasets. This toolset can also be easily extended to fulfill other purposes with its open-source nature.

The COVID-19 viral disease surfaced at the end of 2019 and quickly spread across the globe. To rapidly respond to this pandemic and offer data support for various communities (e.g., decision-makers in health departments and governments, researchers in academia, public citizens), the National Science Foundation (NSF) spatiotemporal innovation center constructed a spatiotemporal platform with various task forces including international researchers and implementation strategies. Compared to similar platforms that only offer viral and health data, this platform views virus-related environmental data collection (EDC) an important component for the geospatial analysis of the pandemic. The EDC contains environmental factors either proven or with potential to influence the spread of COVID-19 and virulence or influence the impact of the pandemic on human health (e.g., temperature, humidity, precipitation, air quality index and pollutants, nighttime light (NTL)). In this platform/framework, environmental data are processed and organized across multiple spatiotemporal scales for a variety of applications (e.g., global mapping of daily temperature, humidity, precipitation, correlation of the pandemic to the mean values of climate and weather factors by city). This paper introduces the raw input data, construction and metadata of reprocessed data, and data storage, as well as the sharing and quality control methodologies of the COVID-19 related environmental data collection.