Which visibility indicators best represent a population’s preference for a level of visual air quality?

Abstract

Several studies have been carried out over the past 20 or so years to assess the level of visual air quality that is judged to be acceptable in urban settings. Groups of individuals were shown slides or computer-projected scenes under a variety of haze conditions and asked to judge whether each image represented acceptable visual air quality. The goal was to assess the level of haziness found to be acceptable for purposes of setting an urban visibility regulatory standard. More recently, similar studies were carried out in Beijing, China, and the more pristine Grand Canyon National Park and Great Gulf Wilderness. The studies clearly showed that when preference ratings were compared to measures of atmospheric haze such as atmospheric extinction, visual range, or deciview (dv), there was not a single indicator that represented acceptable levels of visual air quality for the varied urban or more remote settings. For instance, using a Washington, D.C., setting, 50% of the observers rated the landscape feature as not having acceptable visual air quality at an extinction of 0.19 km−1 (21 km visual range, 29 dv), while the 50% acceptability point for a Denver, Colorado, setting was 0.075 km−1 (52 km visual range, 20 dv) and for the Grand Canyon it was 0.023 km−1 (170 km visual range, 7 dv). Over the past three or four decades, many scene-specific visibility indices have been put forth as potential indicators of visibility levels as perceived by human observers. They include, but are not limited to, color and achromatic contrast of single landscape features, average and equivalent contrast of the entire image, edge detection algorithms such as the Sobel index, and just-noticeable difference or change indexes. This paper explores various scene-specific visual air quality indices and examines their applicability for use in quantifying visibility preference levels and judgments of visual air quality. Implications: Visibility acceptability studies clearly show that visibility become more unacceptable as haze increases. However, there are large variations in the preference levels for different scenes when universal haze indicators, such as atmospheric extinction, are used. This variability is significantly reduced when the sky–landscape contrast of the more distant landscape features in the observed scene is used. Analysis suggest that about 50% of individuals would find the visibility unacceptable if at any time the more distant landscape features nearly disappear, that is, they are at the visual range. This common metric could form the basis for setting an urban visibility standard.