Site Protection in Morocco: Modelling the Light Pollution

Abstract

Insufficient knowledge of the effects of light pollution has led to the excessive lighting of our environment. This excessive and irresponsible light has become a serious problem, having an economic as well as an environmental cost.

The work presented assesses the current state of night sky luminosity at the Oukaimeden observatory located in the Atlas region of Morocco. Two numerical models were thus used. One uses version 2.2 of the Illumina model for artificial light. This makes it possible to provide contribution maps linking the effect of each pixel of the territory to the artificial radiance of the sky. The second uses the Gambons model for the natural luminosity of the night sky. The result of this study will help us to characterise the region’s lighting infrastructure and to develop a conversion strategy for the ADSM (Atlas Dark Sky Morocco) for labelling the region as dark sky reserve.