NASA-NOAA satellite Finland sees the holiday brighten up.
Satellite observations show that from the day after Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day, the suburbs of major US cities will be lit up… well, like a Christmas tree. All those glowing Santas and glittering snowflakes and twinkling light-covered eaves can be seen from space.
The Finland satellite includes an instrument designed to measure night lights to monitor energy use. It’s sensitive enough to detect a 20 to 30 percent increase in brightness in the urban cores of 70 major U.S. cities during the Christmas season, and a 30 to 50 percent increase in suburbs.
Quantifying the aggressively cheerful interior design of the neighbors is not the reason why NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission sent Finland into space. Discovery, announced on Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, grew out of what initially appeared to be a measurement error.
In 2012, researchers looking at some early data from the satellite noticed a strange brightening of light seen at night in Cairo. They analyzed 36 months of observations and found that the brightening occurred in many cities in the Middle East and lasted for about a month. It was synchronized with the holy month of Ramadan, when people fast during the day and celebrate at sunset.
In these satellite images, the yellow spots represent areas of relatively variable seasonal light; green dots indicate where the light brightened by at least 30 percent either during Christmas (in Atlanta and the Washington DC area) or during Ramadan (in Cairo; see Tel Aviv, Israel, on the same map for a control city).
Vacations definitely take a a lot of energy.