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Aubé, M., & Kocifaj, M. (2016). Editorial: Special issue on remote sensing of light pollution. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 181, 1.
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Jechow, A., Hölker, F., Kolláth, Z., Gessner, M. O., & Kyba, C. C. M. (2016). Evaluating the summer night sky brightness at a research field site on Lake Stechlin in northeastern Germany. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 181, 24–32.
Abstract: We report on luminance measurements of the summer night sky at a field site on a freshwater lake in northeastern Germany (Lake Stechlin) to evaluate the amount of artificial skyglow from nearby and distant towns in the context of a planned study on light pollution. The site is located about 70 km north of Berlin in a rural area possibly belonging to one of the darkest regions in Germany. Continuous monitoring of the zenith sky luminance between June and September 2015 was conducted utilizing a Sky Quality Meter. With this device, typical values for clear nights in the range of 21.5–21.7 magSQM/arcsec2 were measured, which is on the order of the natural sky brightness during starry nights. On overcast nights, values down to 22.84 magSQM/arcsec2 were obtained, which is about one third as bright as on clear nights. The luminance measured on clear nights as well as the darkening with the presence of clouds indicate that there is very little influence of artificial skyglow on the zenith sky brightness at this location. Furthermore, fish-eye lens sky imaging luminance photometry was performed with a digital single-lens reflex camera on a clear night in the absence of moonlight. The photographs unravel several distant towns as possible sources of light pollution on the horizon. However, the low level of artificial skyglow makes the field site at Lake Stechlin an excellent location to study the effects of skyglow on a lake ecosystem in a controlled fashion.
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Sánchez de Miguel, A., Zamorano, J., Gómez Castaño, J., & Pascual, S. (2014). Evolution of the energy consumed by street lighting in Spain estimated with DMSP-OLS data. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 139, 109–117.
Abstract: We present the results of the analysis of satellite imagery to study light pollution in Spain. Both calibrated and non-calibrated DMSP-OLS images were used. We describe the method to scale the non-calibrated DMSP-OLS images which allows us to use differential photometry techniques in order to study the evolution of the light pollution. Population data and DMSP-OLS satellite calibrated images for the year 2006 were compared to test the reliability of official statistics in public lighting consumption. We found a relationship between the population and the energy consumption which is valid for several regions. Finally the true evolution of the electricity consumption for street lighting in Spain from 1992 to 2010 was derived; it has been doubled in the last 18 years in most of the provinces.
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Bará, S., Falchi, F., Furgoni, R., & Lima, R. C. (2020). Fast Fourier-transform calculation of artificial night sky brightness maps. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 240, 106658.
Abstract: Light pollution poses a growing threat to optical astronomy, in addition to its detrimental impacts on the natural environment, the intangible heritage of humankind related to the contemplation of the starry sky and, potentially, on human health. The computation of maps showing the spatial distribution of several light pollution related functions (e.g. the anthropogenic zenithal night sky brightness, or the average brightness of the celestial hemisphere) is a key tool for light pollution monitoring and control, providing the scientific rationale for the adoption of informed decisions on public lighting and astronomical site preservation. The calculation of such maps from satellite radiance data for wide regions of the planet with sub-kilometric spatial resolution often implies a huge amount of basic pixel operations, requiring in many cases extremely large computation times. In this paper we show that, using adequate geographical projections, a wide set of light pollution map calculations can be reframed in terms of two-dimensional convolutions that can be easily evaluated using conventional fast Fourier-transform (FFT) algorithms, with typical computation times smaller than 10^-6 s per output pixel.
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Petržala, J. (2018). Feasibility of inverse problem solution for determination of city emission function from night sky radiance measurements. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 213, 86–94.
Abstract: The knowledge of the emission function of a city is crucial for simulation of sky glow in its vicinity. The indirect methods to achieve this function from radiances measured over a part of the sky have been recently developed. In principle, such methods represent an ill-posed inverse problem. This paper deals with the theoretical feasibility study of various approaches to solving of given inverse problem. Particularly, it means testing of fitness of various stabilizing functionals within the Tikhonov’s regularization. Further, the L-curve and generalized cross validation methods were investigated as indicators of an optimal regularization parameter. At first, we created the theoretical model for calculation of a sky spectral radiance in the form of a functional of an emission spectral radiance. Consequently, all the mentioned approaches were examined in numerical experiments with synthetical data generated for the fictitious city and loaded by random errors. The results demonstrate that the second order Tikhonov’s regularization method together with regularization parameter choice by the L-curve maximum curvature criterion provide solutions which are in good agreement with the supposed model emission functions.
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