| Summary: | Ultraviolet (UV) exposure significantly contributes to non-melanoma skin cancer. In the context of health, UV exposure is the product of time and the UV Index (UVI), a weighted sum of the irradiance <i>I(λ)</i> over all wavelengths from <i>λ</i> = 250 to 400 nm. In our analysis of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s UV-Net database of over 400,000 spectral irradiance measurements taken over several years, we found that the UVI is well estimated by 77 <i>I</i><sub>310</sub>. To further understand this result, we applied an optical atmospheric model to generate terrestrial irradiance spectra and found that it applies across a wide range of conditions. An accurate UVI radiometer can be built from a photodiode covered by a bandpass filter centered at 310 nm.
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