Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States, the majority of which is caused by overexposure to ultraviolet (UV) irradiance, which is one component of sunlight. Our group worked with University of Iowa and the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program at CDC to develop and disseminate county-level daily UV irradiance (2005 – 2015) and total solar irradiance (1991 – 2012) data for the contiguous United States (See intro on CDD Tracking webiste). These datasets are freely available at the CDC Tracking Portal. Trend analysis also showed that national annual average daily solar and UV irradiances increased significantly over the years by about 0.3% and 0.5% per year, respectively. These datasets can help us understand the spatial distributions and temporal trends of solar and UV irradiances, and allow for improved characterization of UV and sunlight exposure in future studies.
The Full publication link is here.