Detecting changes in anthropogenic light emissions: limits due to atmospheric variability
arXiv:2405.08279 · doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2024.109187
Abstract
Monitoring the evolution of the anthropogenic light emissions is a priority task in light pollution research. Among the complementary approaches that can be adopted to achieve this goal stand out those based on measuring the direct radiance of the sources at ground level or from low Earth orbit satellites, and on measuring the scattered radiance (known as artificial night sky brightness or skyglow) using networks of ground-based sensors. The terrestrial atmosphere is a variable medium interposed between the sources and the measuring instruments, and the fluctuation of its optical parameters sets a lower limit for the actual source emission changes that can be confidently detected. In this paper we analyze the effect of the fluctuations of the molecular and aerosol optical depths. It is shown that for reliably detecting changes in the anthropogenic light emissions of order ~1% per year, the inter-annual variability of the annual means of these atmospheric parameters in the measurement datasets must be carefully controlled or efficiently corrected for.
22 pages, 2 figures. Accepted version of a paper published in JQSRT
References in corpus (17)
- The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness
- Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges
- An advanced scattered moonlight model for Cerro Paranal
- Sky Quality Meter measurements in a colour changing world
- The propagation of light pollution in the atmosphere
- Systematic measurements of the night sky brightness at 26 locations in Eastern Austria
- Estimating the relative contribution of streetlights, vehicles and residential lighting to the urban night sky brightness
- The night sky brightness at Potsdam-Babelsberg
- Colour remote sensing of the impact of artificial light at night (II): Calibration of DSLR-based images from the International Space Station
- A multi-band map of the natural night sky brightness including Gaia and Hipparcos integrated starlight
- Monitoring transition: expected night sky brightness trends in different photometric bands
- Protecting the night sky darkness in astronomical observatories: a linear systems approach
- Correcting Sky Quality Meter measurements for aging effects using twilight as calibrator
- Long-term trends of light pollution assessed from SQM measurements and an empirical atmospheric model
- PSFs for mapping artificial night sky luminance over large territories
- SG-WAS: a new Wireless Autonomous Night Sky Brightness Sensor
- A revised simplified scattering model for the moonlit sky brightness profile based on photometry at SAAO