Recovering the city street lighting fraction from skyglow measurements in a large-scale municipal dimming experiment

TL;DR

This study evaluates the impact of a large-scale street lighting dimming experiment in Tucson, showing modest reductions in sky brightness and estimating street lights contribute 2-14% to urban skyglow, highlighting complexities in quantifying artificial light sources.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical assessment of street lighting dimming effects on skyglow and compares different modeling approaches to estimate street lights' contribution to sky brightness.

Findings

Sky brightness decreased by approximately 4-5% during dimming.

Modeling suggests street lights contribute about 14% to skyglow.

First principles estimate indicates only 2-3% contribution from street lighting.

Abstract

Anthropogenic skyglow dominates views of the natural night sky in most urban settings, and the associated emission of artificial light at night (ALAN) into the environment of cities involves a number of known and suspected negative externalities. One approach to lowering consumption of ALAN in cities is dimming or extinguishing publicly owned outdoor lighting during overnight hours; however, there are few reports in the literature about the efficacy of these programs. Here we report the results of one of the largest municipal lighting dimming experiments to date, involving $\sim$20,000 roadway luminaires owned and operated by the City of Tucson, Arizona, U.S. We analyzed both single-channel and spatially resolved ground-based measurements of broadband night sky radiance obtained during the tests, determining that the zenith sky brightness during the tests decreased by ($-5.4\pm0.9$)% near the city center and ($-3.6\pm0.9$)% at an adjacent suburban location on nights when the output of the street lighting system was dimmed from 90% of its full power draw to 30% after local midnight. Modeling these changes with a radiative transfer code yields results suggesting that street lights account for about ($14\pm1$)% of light emissions resulting in skyglow seen over the city. A separate derivation from first principles implies that street lighting contributes only 2-3% of light seen at the zenith over Tucson. We discuss this inconsistency and suggest routes for future work.