← Search

Data · dataset · 2026

Relationship between ozone and biologically relevant UV at 4 NDACC sites

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

Clouds and aerosols, as well as overhead ozone, can have large effects on ultraviolet (UV) irradiances.

Description

We use statistical methods to remove cloud effects and mean aerosol effects from spectral UV irradiance measurements to investigate the relationship between UV and total column ozone. We show that for fixed solar zenith angles (SZA), seasonal changes in ozone lead to marked changes in clear-sky UV irradiances.

Such effects are larger at mid-latitudes than in the tropics. At mid-latitudes, the minimum ozone amount over the course of a year can be about 50 percent of its maximum, with the lowest values in autumn and the highest values in spring. These seasonal ozone changes lead to UV Index (UVI) values in autumn that can exceed those in spring at the same SZA by nearly a factor of two.

Read the rest (2 more)

Differences are even larger for UV spectra weighted by the action spectra for DNA-damaging UV, and for cutaneous previtamin D production. In some cases, the seasonal increase exceeds a factor of 4. The analysis experimentally demonstrates the limits of applicability of the concept of constant Radiative Amplification Factors (RAFs) for estimating effects of changes in ozone for some weighting functions.

Changes in DNA-weighted UV and erythemally weighted UV are well represented by the published RAFs. However, there are large SZA dependencies in the case of UVB and vitamin D-weighted UV. For all weightings considered, RAFs calculated from the observations as a function of SZA show similar dependencies between sites, in good agreement with published values, independently of the ozone data source.

Links

Get the data

Where it is published

Catalogue records · 1

Topics

Inferred from text
Atmospheric aerosols 76%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research3c7f747a-0393-4f2a-9422-9c284bd6e96813 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].anzsrc:field:370103enrichment · data ucar edutaxonomy-embedding@1.1.0title+keywords+description (76%)
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0