Tuesday, 11 February 2003: 1:59 PM
The UV Climatology in Belgium determined from ground based UV monitoring
Since the end of the 80's, The Belgium Institute for Space Aeronomy (IASB) and the Royal Institute for Meteorology (IRM) have developed automatic stations to measure continuously the UV (UV-B & UV-A) & Visible Solar irradiance (280-600 nm) at the Earth's surface.
The IASB station consists in a combination of instruments including spectro-radiometers, filter-radiometers and broadband radiometers providing absolute values of the total, direct and diffuse components of the solar irradiance.
The IRM station is mainly based on a ‘Brewer’ spectro-radiometer, and a ‘Dobson’ spectrometer completed by ancillary instruments providing e.g. global UV measurements, Ozone and SO2 total column determinations. UV measurements are available since April 1989 with the IRM instruments and since April 1993 with the IASB station.
From the 14-years period of available continuous measurements and 10-years period of overlapped measurements with two sets of instruments, it is possible to define the major characteristics of the UV climatology in Belgium and by extension in the 50°-latitude area.
The major results will be presented and discussed in terms of correlation between the UV-B irradiances and the main atmospheric parameters like Ozone (total column and profile), Clouds cover, Aerosols…Some preliminary results on potential trends will also be discussed.
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