Artificial light pollution over Poland

Here we present an updated map of night sky brightness. Model that was used to create this map was originally created by Berry and then was improved in our published work. We used high resolution population raster provided by the GHSL. To model night sky brightness we used each cell of raster map as a single light source. This is a new map created in a more reliable way. We included information about topography using Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Additionally we used genetic algorithm to obtain reliable parameters of the model. The resultant map has resolution of 100m.

More information about the model are in the paper:

• H. Netzel, P. Netzel, 2018: High resolution map of light pollution. J. of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, Vol. 221, pp. 300-308, preprint, paper.
• H. Netzel, P. Netzel, 2016: High resolution map of light pollution over Poland. J. of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, Vol. 181, pp. 67-73, preprint, paper.

This solution was also presented during the following conferences:

• H.Netzel, P.Netzel, High-resolution map of light pollution , LPTMM 2017, Cellers, Spain;
• H.Netzel, P.Netzel, The updated map of light pollution , ALAN 2016, Cluj-Napoca, Romania;
• H.Netzel, P.Netzel, Modelling of light pollution over Poland using Berry's model with high resolution data, ALAN 2015, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada;
• H.Netzel, P.Netzel, Modelling of light pollution over Poland using high resolution data, LPTMM 2015, Jouvence, Québec, Canada.

The software - darksky - that was used for calculations is available here. Binaries for Linux and Windows are available in the package plTools and QGIS plugin.

Authors: Henryka Netzel, Paweł Netzel