Night light pollution: how global religious customs shape its patterns
In the last decades, dark skies colored with an orange glow have grown to be the main norm during night in urban areas all around the world. Artificial light at night has grown a rough average of 6% every year globally, and its implications in detriment of the environment and the biodiversity are va...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2022 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/361169 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/361169 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Mathematical statistics Artificial Night Light Pollution Circular Statistics Bayesian Statistics Bayesian Modeling Time Series Estadística matemàtica Classificació AMS::62 Statistics::62F Parametric inference Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Estadística matemàtica |
| Sumario: | In the last decades, dark skies colored with an orange glow have grown to be the main norm during night in urban areas all around the world. Artificial light at night has grown a rough average of 6% every year globally, and its implications in detriment of the environment and the biodiversity are vast and diverse. The only way to mitigate its effects is based on restrictive olicymaking both publicly and privately; to do so, we need to understand better its ehavior. Local and regional patterns regarding light pollution have usually been demonstrated with socioeconomic data. However, with the normalization of the access to satellite remote imagery, we can extract essential information from everything that is visible (and/or measurable) on Earth. With these innovative tools, we wanted to test the hypothesis of worldwide religious events orfestivities shaping the annual light pollution peaks or highest frequency periods. Thanks to satellite imagery taken by the VIIRS sensor on board of the Suomi NPP weather satellite, and the Google Earth Engine platform, we were able to extract the monthly Light Frequency Time Series for the period 2016-2019, for 136 countries. Along with Circular Statistics techniques to study the cyclical time patterns of light pollution – and data visualization, we succeeded to relate the global religious events with a cyclical light pollution pattern. Above all, Christmas, Ramadan, and Diwali festivities, showed to have a significant effect on the annual timing of light pollution peaks in countries of Europe, Asia, and North America, except for Africa in the case of the Muslim festivity, Ramadan. Overall, however, Christmas turned out to be the most light-pollutant festivity in the world, due to the export of Christmas from christian countries to Asian countries such as China. For Islam, only countries from Middle East & North Africa –Islam’s cradle – showed a clear pattern during Ramadan months; in other Muslim countries, the yearly light pollution peak occurred during Christmas. Our evidence highlighted, once again, the gregarious behavior of humans regarding their light pemission patterns, and how predictable are the annual periods of highest artificial light pollution at night. We believe this can be useful regarding new policies for the mitigation of the effects of night light pollution during the celebration of global religious events such as Christmas, to have a responsible and sustainable relation with our environment. |
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