Experiment Uses Smart City Lighting to Measure Streetlight Emissions
Phoenix666 writes:
Experiment uses smart city lighting to measure streetlight emissions:
The team conducted an experiment by changing the brightness of streetlights in the city of Tucson, Arizona, U.S., and observing how this changed how bright the city appeared from space. Dr. Christopher Kyba from the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences led the team that conducted the experiment, and said the work is important because it shows that smart city technologies can be used to perform city-scale experiments.
"When sensors and control systems are installed throughout an entire city, it makes it possible to make a change in how the city works, and then measure the impact that change has on the environment, even from outer space," Kyba said.
Over 10 days in March and April of 2019, Tucson officials changed the brightness settings for about 14,000 of the city's 19,500 streetlights. Usually, most streetlights in Tucson start out at 90 percent of their maximum possible illumination, and dim to 60 percent at midnight. During the experiment, the city instead dimmed lights all the way down to 30 percent on some nights, and brightened them up to 100 percent on others.
Turning the streetlights off entirely could save even more energy.
Journal Reference:
CCM Kyba, A Ruby, Hu Kuechly, et al. Direct measurement of the contribution of street lighting to satellite observations of nighttime light emissions from urban areas:, Lighting Research & Technology (DOI: 10.1177/1477153520958463)
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