I'm soon starting up a Nighttime Lights Remote Sensing webinar. Speakers will come from all over the world, and the talks will take place alternately in the (European) morning or late afternoon/evening, to allow international participation.
The first talk in the series is next Monday. If you're interested in attending, sign up here: https://www.listserv.dfn.de/sympa/subscribe/nlrs_webinar
#RemoteSensing #NighttimeLights #VIIRS_DNB #SDGSat1 #EarthObservation #FutureEO #ESA #NASA #NOAA
A really interesting paper just came out in Science a few weeks ago: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472
The authors compared satellite measurements of #LightPollution from #VIIRS_DNB to 2.6 million bird calls recorded at 7,824 locations around the world. They show not only that birds sing longer at both morning and night in areas that are brighter, but that the response is different for different species.
For example, species with larger eyes are more strongly affected, and species that nest in cavities (protected from light exposure) are less affected.
Very cool work!
Reminder: my #LPS25 talk is tomorrow - literally the last talk of the conference.
But I promise it's going to be entertaining and you'll leave on a high note! Here's a sneak peak...
#RemoteSensing #LightPollution #Aotearoa #NewZealand #VIIRS_DNB #SuomiNPP #Night
So what did we find? Well, first, we compared the number of lights that our participants counted (per square kilometer) to the brightness of the #VIIRS_DNB satellite instrument.
We see a clear correlation between the two, and this gives us a "conversion" factor from "nW/cm^2sr" to "lights/km^2".
We used this factor to calculate how many light sources out team would count if we covered the entire area of Germany exactly at midnight. Our result is 78 ± 3 million lights, or roughly one per person.
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This is an interesting new #OpenAccess paper looking at the intersection of energy, development, neighborhood race and class in #SouthAfrica.
They find that #Solar panel installation is by far more common in wealthy and especially white neighborhoods, and that the drop in #NighttimeLight radiance observed from #VIIRS_DNB is lowest in these neighborhoods.
They suggest that solar adoption may reduce the impact of #LoadShedding (i.e. #RollingBlackouts).
I see a few issues with their methodology, but it's nevertheless so interesting to see all these aspects combined with day and nighttime #RemoteSensing.
New preprint by @salvabara asks whether it's possible to reconcile observations of the rate of increasing #LightPollution from #GlobeAtNight and #VIIRS_DNB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13111
Conclusion: it's *possible* that they are in agreement, but it requires assuming that there is a lot of increase in glare affecting the GaN observers.
Salva, I didn't quite understand whether you model a shift in which more of the light is emitted horizontally, not causing glare, but just brightening the sky?
Christopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺
Christopher Kyba