Research on spectral factors towards determining nocturnal ground irradiance under overcast sky conditions in densely populated regions

Abstract

Light pollution is closely correlated with the meteorological factors, specifically cloudiness that is one of the major amplifiers of night sky radiances in urban regions. Although the decisive effects of cloud deck on artificial nighttime skyglow have been recognized experimentally, the radiative transfer modelling in a heterogeneous nocturnal environment illuminated from many light sources is a non-trivial problem that is difficult to solve both theoretically and numerically. A satisfactorily accurate evaluation of ground-reaching diffuse light is, however, an important issue as some optical properties (e.g. horizontal irradiance) are usually difficult to obtain with common instruments. Overcast sky represents a special class of situations in which clouds can act as amplifiers of the light pollution of the city.In this paper we proceeded with a simple two-stream approach to solve the scalar radiative transfer equation (RTE) under overcast conditions. The technique we are using allows for a rapid prediction of ground irradiances in densely populated regions assuming various emission functions. We have shown that the classical RTE concept can be adopted in determining the diffuse irradiance, while the model abilities are illustrated in a set of numerical experiments for low and high turbidity states.