Assessment of light pollution for environmental protection in tropical areas

Abdullahi, M.G and R., Umar and Kamarudin, M. K. A. (2016) Assessment of light pollution for environmental protection in tropical areas. In: Challenges in Environmental Science & Engineering, 06-10 Nov 2016, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

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Abstract

This article reports the artificial light measurements of the night sky at the 14 cities in Nigeria; due to the vast growing of industries, residential and commercial uses; which can make the night sky brightness in the area above the threshold set for polluted status. The study monitored the zenith sky brightness from November 2015 to March 2016. However, values ranging from 20.14 to 22.00 Mags.sqm /arc sec2 were measured, corresponding to the order of the natural sky brightness measurement during starry nights. We use Agglomerative Hierarchical Method via Ward’s Methods to cluster our data according to the pollution status. Our findings show three cluster classes of 1, 2 and 3 which represents low, moderate and high pollution status. The urban areas classified in class 3 were cities with high uses of artificial light. Hence, our results during the clear and darkening nights indicated that the influence of artificial luminance in Nigeria at the zenith is subtle. The results illustrated that Nigeria has excellent dark location. On the other hand, the sites in cluster 1 were classified as the darkest location that can be used to build optical observatory due to their dark sky and can be used as the suitable place for a zoological garden.

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