city lights

[tw]

Originally posted by node
I'd have thought California, or at least bits of it, would be way brighter than they are on the map. Big state, lots of people etc.

NYC has 8 million people but accounts for very little of the light. Most of light around NYC comes from the other 8 Million who are living outside of NYC.

Science has noted that we expend a tremendous amount of lighting which is lost into space. Little has been accomplished or proposes as to eliminate this energy waste. But, like radio transmissions, heat, etc, it makes space research more of a challenge

These photos were taken by the DMSP satellites. It is a redundanct program cited as wasteful by GAO since an entire duplicate program called Tiros also exists. When I was working on (what I believe to have been called) DMSP 8, the program was suppose to have been scrapped. But some quick thinking political types got it revived by slapping the Maritime emergency locator receivers on the DMSP birds.

Like Tiros, the DMSP circles earth to be in the same time in every time zone - 24 orbits per day if I remember. There are two birds. This picture must be a composite of many days since only the sections without cloud cover could be used.

This picture has better detail than my national picture. In mine, no black between NYC and Princeton NJ. My picture shows a solid white mass from Montauck NY (east point of Long Island), and from Hartford CT, all the way down to Wilmington DE.

Undertoad has noted NJ as the most urban state in the nation. When I-287 was built through Parsippany, Morristown, Somerville, and Edison, about 90% of the state population lived within that belt. Still today, the nation's most urban state has large open areas.

Today, population has grown around Philly and the coastal strip. IOW almost every building on that NJ coastal strip has never seen a hurricane nor even a major storm such as the Northeaster of 1965. Not only is that coastal area only recently populated on low land, but noone really knows what would be required to evacuate those heavily populated off-shore sandbars.

The light suggest a population concentration equivalent to the FL concentration that had highways jammed stopped during a hurricane threat.