Computing light pollution indicators for environmental assessment

Abstract

AbstractLight pollution modeling and monitoring has traditionally used zenith sky brightness as its main indicator. Several other indicators (e.g., average sky radiance, horizontal irradiance, and average sky radiance at given interval of zenith distances) may be more useful, both for general and specific purposes of ecology studies, night sky, and environmental monitoring. These indicators can be calculated after the whole sky radiance is known with sufficient angular detail. This means, for each site, to integrate the contribution in each direction of the sky of each light source in the radius of hundreds of km. This approach is extremely high time‐consuming if the mapping is desired for a large territory. Here, we present a way to obtain maps of large territories for a large subset of useful indicators, bypassing the need to calculate first the radiance map of the whole sky in each site to obtain from it the desired indicator in that site. For each indicator, a point spread function (PSF) is calculated from the whole sky radiance maps generated by a single source at sufficiently dense number of distances from the observing site. If the PSF is transversally shift‐invariant, that is, if it depends only on the relative position of source and observer, then we can further speed up the map calculation via the use of fast Fourier‐transform. We present here examples of maps for different indicators. Precise results can be calculated for any single site, taking into account the site and light sources' altitudes, by means of specific inhomogeneous (spatially variant) and anisotropic (nonrotationally symmetric) PSFs.Key points Light pollution is not anymore viewed as an astronomycentric issue. On the contrary, it is a multidisciplinary problem, involving, between others, physicists, ecologists, physiologists, engineers, politicians. Some of the disciplines that will directly take advantage from the methods explained here are: astronomy, ecology and ethology (in condition of altered night light), urban and landscape planning, environmental protection.