Light Pollution And The Concentration Of Anthropogenic Photons In The Terrestrial Atmosphere
Light pollution can be rigorously described in terms of the volume concentration of anthropogenic photons (light quanta) in the terrestrial atmosphere.
This formulation, consistent with the basic physics of the emission, scattering and absorption of light, allows one to express light pollution levels in terms of particle volume concentrations, in a completely analogous way as it is currently done with other classical pollutants, like particulate matter or molecular contaminants.
In this work we provide the explicit conversion equations between the photon volume concentration and the traditional light photometry quantities. This equivalent description of the light pollution levels provides some relevant insights that help to identify artificial light at night as a standard pollutant. It also enables a complementary way of expressing artificial light exposures for environmental and public health research and regulatory purposes.
Salvador BarΓ‘, Carmen Bao-Varela, Fabio Falchi
Comments: 15 pages, 2 figures. This is an author-formatted version of the accepted manuscript whose version of record has been published in Atmospheric Pollution Research, 2022, 13(9):101541, this https URL
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Optics (physics.optics)
Cite as: arXiv:2210.14131 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2210.14131v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Journal reference: Atmospheric Pollution Research, 2022, 13(9):101541
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apr.2022.101541
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Submission history
From: Salvador BarΓ‘
[v1] Tue, 25 Oct 2022 16:29:13 UTC (440 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14131
