Potential City Lights Targets

11/21/14Cindy Combs

For this check, granules corresponding to a few days on either side of the new moon in June (6/23-7/01, with 6/27/14 new moon) over the US southwest were used as the sample cases.

Various areas were examined, including California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana and Texas

Texas (left) has a lot of lights close together, making it difficult to single out one city/town. California was worse.

The Gulf off Texas was pretty dark.

So, targets in Arizona, New Mexico and off the Louisiana coast are shown

Arizona

Example of Arizona sectors on 6/24/14

Red = PhoenixGreen = FlagstaffYellow = KingmanLight Blue = Tucson

These are sample areas – can be reduced to bright pixels.

Small Towns

Flagstaff, AZ Kingman, AZ

Big Cities

Phoenix, AZ Tuscon, AZ

New Mexico

Example of New Mexico sectors on 6/28/14

Red = AlbuquerqueGreen = SocorroYellow = Las CrucesLight Blue = Tucumcari

Small Towns

Tucumcari, NM Socorro, NM

Big Cities

Albuquerque, NM Las Cruces, NM

Gulf of Mexico Louisiana Coast

Example of Gulf of Mexico sector on 7/01/14Red = Target site

To guarantee that lights are stationary targets and not ships, here are three passes over the same sector. The left is before new moon; the next two after. There are several that seem to be stationary, but not consistent in brightness. I have pointed in the right image what I consider the two best contenders.

Potential targets

Overall comments:1. Big Cities: Phoenix is a biggest target. Tucson is nice sized and compact. El Paso, TX (south of Las Cruces) is another possibility.

2. Small Towns: Socorro is compact and bright. Tucumcari is slightly bigger but also compact. Flagstaff and Kingman are a little spread out.

3. Oil Rigs: The two target I would try for are noted in slide #14

Further work:

If any of these targets are acceptable, the next item would be to look at multiple months. That would require pulling data from Wisconsin. Do we want to pull data from previous years (2012,2013) or stick with just 2014?

I’m also assuming this would be more PDF work like we did with the snow cases?