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Lecture – VIIRS as a data source for light pollution quantification
We would like to invite you to the scientific lecture entitled “VIIRS as a data source for light pollution quantification” which will take place on Tuesday, May 30, at 10.00 in the Institute of Construction and Architecture Conference room. Lecture is focused on the satellite data acquisition, pre-processing, possible issues and final evaluation of Earth night radiance. The lecture is intended for scientific and general public audience.
Air pollution mitigation can reduce the brightness of the night sky in and near cities
We wanted to briefly draw attention to a paper published last week in Nature Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-94241-1. We build on existing work connecting air quality with skyglow formation through a combination of radiative transfer theory and simulations, plus a field experiment simulating a persistent reduction in air pollution during which we measured a decrease in skyglow consistent with our calculations.
Miro Kocifaj (Slovakia) and John Barentine (USA)
Postdoctoral position on skyglow modeling
The ICA of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia, is seeking candidates for a postdoctoral position. The successful candidate will join the theory group at the ICA and will work for the internal research project “Night sky brightness: modeling and characterization“. The project goals are to theoretically, numerically and experimentally analyze artificial light and sky-glow, and also to characterize light emissions from cities/towns.
More information…
NOVEL LIGHTNING THREAT INDICATOR (European patent No. 3105614 has been filed in 2018)
The patent describes a method for determining if there is an increased chance of lightning. Lightning is a threat especially to aircraft launching and landing as a lightning strike can cause loss of power and instrument failure and result in catastrophe. As a safety precaution, airports close during increased lightning threats. Such closures are expensive. Accurately assessing the threat of lightning can save resources, since airports could remain open when there is no threat.
Research: Retrieval of angular emission function from whole-city light sources
The research performed by our team promises great progress in light-pollution modeling as this is the first time the indirect remote-sensing method, to retrieve the CEF from sky-brightness measurements, has been developed and successfully applied to experimental data.
Workgroup: Miroslav KOCIFAJ, Ladislav Kómar, Jaromír Petržala, František Kundracik, Ondrej Štefík
Research projects: APVV-14-0017 and VEGA 2/0016/16