Light Pollution:

The theoretical, numerical and experimental findings of our project can be applied in different fields of science. One of very interesting and rapidly developing phenomenon is called “light pollution” that is recognized as a serious ecological, astronomical, and overillumination problem of the last decades. It is well recognized that, under clear-sky conditions, light pollution is closely related to atmospheric turbidity and aerosol contamination. Aerosols are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, but their effects on atmospheric radiative energy budget are still highly uncertain. This is because of lack of knowledge of the variability and quantification of the aerosol loading, in addition to lack of knowledge of how these aerosols interact with electromagnetic radiation. The decisive effects of natural and manmade aerosols on radiative balance have been recognized, but remain poorly quantified. While some progress has been made in the past several years, the atmospheric aerosols and broken cloud arrays still remains the largest source of uncertainty in characterization of light field under night-sky conditions.

Apart from targeted field campaigns, the numerical modeling appears to be one of attractive and powerful approaches for prediction the light pollution levels. However, a modeling of realistic night-sky radiances over any territory belongs to unsolvable problems or at least it is quite difficult calculation task.

Characterization of nigh sky luminance / radiance patterns and the potential applications were discussed at the conference on “Light Pollution: Theory, Modelling, and Measurements” (April 15-18, 2013, Smolenice, Slovak republic: http://lptmm.org/).