Statistical modelling and satellite monitoring of upward light from public lighting

© The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish MICINN [AYA2012-30717, AYA2012-31277 and AY2013-46724-P], by the Spanish program of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI), the Madrid Regional Government through the SpaceTec Project [S2013/ICE-2822], the Galician Government [Programa de Consolidación e Estructuración de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas, grant CN 2012/156], by a FPU grant (Formación de Profesorado Universitario) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCINN) to Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel. The support of the Spanish Network for Light Pollution Studies (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Acción Complementaria AYA2011-15808-E) and the municipality of Deltebre is also acknowledged.
In this work, we propose an approach to estimating the amount of light wasted by being sent towards the upper hemisphere from urban areas. This is a source of light pollution. The approach is based on a predictive model that provides the fraction of light directed skywards in terms of a small set of identified explanatory variables that characterise the urban landscape and its light sources. The model, built via the statistical analysis of a wide sample of basic urban scenarios to compute accurately the amount of light wasted at each of them, establishes an optimal linear regression function that relates the fraction of wasted flux to relevant variables like the kind of luminaires, the street fill factor, the street width, the building and luminaire heights and the walls and pavement reflectances. We applied this model to evaluate the changes in emissions produced at two urban nuclei in the Deltebre municipality of Catalonia. The results agree reasonably well with those deduced from the radiance measurements made with the VIIRS instrument onboard the Suomi-NPP Earth orbiting satellite.
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN)
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
Comunidad de Madrid
Programa Campus de Excelencia Internacional Moncloa (CEI)
Comunidad Autónoma de Galicia - Programa de Consolidación e Estruturación de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas
Formación de Profesorado Universitario (FPU)
Spanish Network for Light Pollution Studies - Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), España
Ayuntamiento de Deltebre
Depto. de Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica
Fac. de Ciencias Físicas
TRUE
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