Columns:: $1.8 million award will help monitor ultraviolet radiation

since 12/15/98

Columns::November 10, 2003

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Campus News

$1.8 million award will help monitor ultraviolet radiation

By Kim Cretors
kcretors@uga.edu

The National Ultraviolet Monitoring Center in UGA’s department of physics and astronomy has been awarded a contract of $1.8 million for three years from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The award will allow the NUVMC to continue to monitor, throughout the United States, ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface and ozone levels in the atmosphere.
“Ozone depletion in the stratosphere has resulted in enhanced levels of ultraviolet radiation at the Earth’s surface,” says John E. Rives, emeritus professor and director of the NUVMC. “This has important potentially harmful consequences for both human health and the health of our environment.”
Changes in the levels of UV radiation may also have significant effects on climate change, according to Rives, and can be used as an indicator of climate change. “Accurate measurements of surface UV irradiation levels are therefore of vital importance,” he says.
As a result, the EPA is funding the NUVMC to manage a network of instruments that continually obtains data for surface UV irradiation and column ozone. A long-term trend analysis of this data will provide a check on how well the ozone levels are responding to the Montreal Protocol agreements on the emission of chlorofluorocarbons.
The NUVMC was established about eight years ago to manage a network of 21 UV spectrophotometer instruments throughout the United States. The network is the largest one of its kind and the sites cover a wide range of climate--including sub-tropical in the Virgin Islands, tundra in Alaska and a desert/arid climate in New Mexico. The network includes both “clean” sites, located in 14 national parks, and five urban sites.
The data from the network is stored on a database at UGA and is available to researchers for application to a wide range of topics, including trends in ozone depletion, medical studies of UV on human health, environmental consequences of enhanced UV and the relationship between UV and climate change. NASA uses the data to validate their satellite measurements of UV; those in turn are used by the National Weather Service to validate the UV index numbers.
Richard Meltzer serves as associate director, and Michael Kimlin as technical director of the NUVMC. Both are faculty members in the physics department.

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