Between 2018 and 2050, the world’s urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion, an addition of about 170,000 people a day, according to estimates by the United Nations. This is equal to adding a city the size of Providence, Rhode Island, every day for the next 41 years. A majority of this growth will occur in developing countries.

As Earth’s population continues to grow, remote sensing data offer a view from space of the impacts of urbanization, whether that's changes in the landscape through deforestation, the creation of heat islands through sunlight-absorbing building materials, or the modification of air quality through increases in pollutants. NASA also curates sociological data to provide more context around people’s living standards and population distribution.

Our data include resources useful to the study of urbanization and urban sprawl, such as metropolitan statistical areas, heat estimates, nighttime lights datasets, and population density grids. These products help scientists understand the ecological, sociological, and economic impact of growing cities around the world.