2024/05/14 by Salvador Bará · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Air Quality Monitoring and Forecasting #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2024.109187
arxiv published 2024/05/14 · openalex publication_date 2024/09/07 · arxiv updated 2024/10/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
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.