Progress report: 24 hour gridded population models

In a paper presented at the 2009 EFGS Conference in The Hague we set out the early stages of a UK research project focused on the production of time-specific gridded population models. The present paper reviews overall progress with this work and develops in more detail some aspects of the modelling principles and available data sources which make this possible. The paper seeks to demonstrate how readily accessible data are beginning to provide many of the key inputs required to make time-specific representations of population. Time-specific models have the potential to overcome many key weaknesses of current representations which are generally based on dated population statistics about population numbers at place of residence and which fail to reflect massive cyclical spatial redistributions of population. In many application areas, current analyses persist in using population maps with major deficiencies due to the absence of plausible alternative models. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: the following section provides a brief review of the case for more sophisticated time-space population distributions. The third section reviews issues arising from the challenge of data source acquisition and integration and the final section indicates the progress made in the project to date with regard to addressing these challenges.