Ultraviolet sky radiance distributions of translucent overcast skies

Summary

The diffuse sky radiation component in the ultraviolet wavelengths is often at least 50% of the global irradiance under clear skies, and is the dominant component of ultraviolet global radiation under translucent overcast skies. The distribution of sky radiance was measured in a rural area and modeled for wavelength bands of ultraviolet-B (UVB, 280–320 nm) and ultraviolet-A (UVA, 320–400 nm). Sky radiance measurements were made during the summer of 1993 over a wide range of solar zenith angles using radiance sensors mounted on a hand-operated hemispherical rotation mount. UVB irradiance measurements were also made during each scan. Since the ratio of measured irradiance under overcast skies and that predicted for clear skies was not correlated with cloud base height, opaque cloud fraction, or solar zenith angle, it was concluded that the scattering from the clouds dominated the global irradiance, and this scattering was relatively unaffected by the scattering off opaque clouds in the translucent atmosphere.

Analysis of the translucent overcast sky UVA and UVB radiance measurements using a semi-empirical distribution model showed that the spectral influences on multiple scattering, single scattering, and horizon brightening components of the distributions agreed with basic atmospheric radiation theory. The best model used solar zenith, the sky zenith, and the scattering angle with resultant coefficient of determination values of 0.62 and 0.25 for the UVA and UVB respectively. The developed equations can be applied directly to the diffuse sky irradiance on the horizontal to provide radiance distributions for the sky.