You are here:
DATA FROM EPA'S UV MONITORING NETWORK
Citation:
Shreffler, J H. DATA FROM EPA'S UV MONITORING NETWORK. Presented at 13th International Congress on Photobiology, San Francisco, CA, July 2-6, 2000.
Impact/Purpose:
To understand and characterize the factors, including optical transmission properties of aerosols, which affect the intensity of UV-B radiation measured at the earth's surface in order to improve our estimates of ecosystem and human exposures to UV-B radiation; to understand the relationship between UV radiation and total column ozone; to model UV-B exposures at different locations, conditions, and times in order to estimate UV-B exposures throughout the US. This objective is achieved by maintaining a strict quality assurance program for both the Brewer Spectrophotometers in the network and the UV data obtained from the Brewers.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in cooperation with the National Park Service, has deployed 21 Brewer spectrophotometers in a national network for monitoring UV radiation from the sun. Seven of the Brewers are in urban areas, and fourteen are in National Parks (Figure 1). Raw data from the EPA UV Monitoring Network are easily accessible from a Web site. Rather simple filtering procedures can be used to eliminate questionable data. Correction of the response function for drift results in data in good agreement with output of a simple model (TUV). This paper illustrates the data adjustment and some results from the sites at RTP and Albuquerque, the latter having summer Diffey-weighted UV maxima at least 20% higher than those at RTP due to differences in altitude, ozone column, and aerosols.