The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness
By F. Falchi, P. Cinzano, D. Duriscoe, Christopher C. M. Kyba, Christopher D. Elvidge, Kimberly E. Baugh, B. Portnov, N. Rybnikova, R. Furgoni. Science Advances, 2016
1,452 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The world atlas of zenith artificial night sky brightness is modelled with VIIRS DNB data and calibrated with more than 35,000 observations. Artificial lights raise night sky luminance, creating the most visible effect of light pollution—artificial skyglow. Despite the increasing interest among scientists in fields such as ecology, astronomy, health care, and land-use planning, light pollution lacks a current quantification of its magnitude on a global scale. To overcome this, we present the world atlas of artificial sky luminance, computed with our light pollution propagation software using new high-resolution satellite data and new precision sky brightness measurements. This atlas shows that more than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than one-third of humanity, including 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. Moreover, 23% of the world’s land surfaces between 75°N and 60°S, 88% of Europe, and almost half of the United States experience light-polluted nights.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33a4ecf9716db540a20abf77c06d188960ac14bb
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Bright lights in the big cities: migratory birds’ exposure to artificial light (2019, background): “Furthermore, different datasets are available (eg a world atlas of artificial night sky brightness; Falchi et al. 2016), which may provide valuable information for characterizing ALAN’s disruptions to aerial organismal biology (eg horizon glow versus upward radiance).”
- How bright is moonlight (2017, background): “We report observations of the supermoon of 14 November 2016, made in an open field 49 km from the centre of Vienna, Austria (47.7956°N, 16.1366°E) at 23:25 local time.”
- Mechanistic, ecological, and evolutionary consequences of artificial light at night for insects: review and prospective (2019, background): “ALAN is a widespread phenomenon of continuous expansion due to urbanization increases: each year, 6%more of the earth’s surface is contaminated, and 80% of the humanworld’s population lives under light-polluted skies (Falchi et al., 2016).”
- Light pollution is a driver of insect declines (2020, background): “By 2014, over 23% of the land surface of the planet experienced artificially elevated levels of night sky brightness (Falchi et al., 2016); by comparison, agricultural crops cover approximately 12% (FAO, 2012).”
- Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives (2019, neutral): “With improvements in the spatial resolution, consistency, dynamic range, and radiometric quantization, the issues of saturation effects in urban cores and blooming issues are not significant as DMSP-OLS [27,219] and NPP-VIIRS data can be used directly for temporal analyses.”
- VIIRS night-time lights (2017, background): “…of the widely used geospatial data products (Amaral et al. 2005; Small, Pozzi, and Elvidge 2005; Sutton et al. 2007; Bharti et al. 2009; Chand et al. 2009; Ghosh et al. 2010; Oda and Maksyutov 2011; Witmer and O’loughlin 2011; He et al. 2012; Mazor et al. 2013; Min et al. 2013; Falchi et al. 2016).”
- Is light pollution driving moth population declines? A review of causal mechanisms across the life cycle (2020, background): “polluted skies (Falchi et al., 2016), and the global area that is arti-”