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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Wind farm lights are a conspicuous feature in the nocturnal landscape. Their presence is a source of light pollution for residents and the environment, severely disrupting in some places the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific values of the pristine starry skies. In this work we present a simple model for quantifying the visual impact of individual wind turbine lights, based on the comparison of their brightness with the brightness of well- known night sky objects. The model includes atmospheric and visual variables, and for typical parameters it shows that medium-intensity turbine lights can be brighter than Venus up to ~4 km from the turbine, brighter than CMa (the brightest star on the nighttime sky) until about ~10 km, and reach the standard stellar visibility limit for the unaided eye (m v =+6.00) at ~38 km. These results suggest that the visual range of wind farms at nighttime may be significantly larger than at daytime, a factor that should be taken into account in environmental impact assessments.
Description
Keywords
Light pollution Wind farms Nocturnal landscape Environmental impacts assessment Naked eye astronomy Atmospheric extinction
Citation
Bará, S., & C․ Lima, R. (2024). Quantifying the visual impact of wind farm lights on the nocturnal landscape. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 329, 109203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jqsrt.2024.109203
Publisher
Elsevier