Night on Earth: Mapping decadal changes of anthropogenic night light in Asia

► Annual night light composites show changes in number and extent of anthropogenic development from 1992 to 2009. ► Empirical orthogonal function analysis is used to quantify decadal changes in night light brightness for Asia. ► Between 1992 and 2009 both China and India experienced a ∼20% increase in number of lights and a ∼270% increase in lighted area. ► Over a wide range of brightnesses, the size distributions of spatially contiguous lighted area are consistent with power laws with exponents near −1 as predicted by Zipf's Law for cities.