2024/09/25 by Salvador Bará, Raul C. Lima · 1 voice · 1 citation
Environmental Science · #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Urban Heat Island Mitigation #Remote Sensing in Agriculture
paper · doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2024.109203
• A model for quantifying light pollution from wind turbine lights is proposed. • Brightness of lights from wind turbines can far exceed that of the brightest stars. • The visual range of wind farms at night is generally larger than at daytime. • A study of the visual impact at night of four prospective windfarms is presented. • The model proposed may be used in environmental impact and landscape assessments. Wind farm lights are a conspicuous feature in the nocturnal landscape. Their presence is a source of light pollution for residents and the environment, severely disrupting in some places the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific values of the pristine starry skies. In this work we present a simple model for quantifying the visual impact of individual wind turbine lights, based on the comparison of their brightness with the brightness of well-known night sky objects. The model includes atmospheric and visual variables, and for typical parameters it shows that medium-intensity turbine lights can be brighter than Venus up to ∼4 km from the turbine, brighter than α CMa (the brightest star on the nighttime sky) until about ∼10 km, and reach the standard stellar visibility limit for the unaided eye ( m v = +6.00) at ∼38 km. These results suggest that the visual range of wind farms at nighttime may be significantly larger than at daytime, a factor that should be taken into account in environmental impact assessments.