Comparison of monthly means daily UVA from CERES with ground-based measurements

The importance to monitor surface UVA solar radiation is mainly associated with its consequences over the human health as well as plants growth. High-quality ground-based measurements of UVA present better accuracy with respect to satellite retrievals. On the other hand, satellite data allows a better spatial coverage, something of great importance on areas with lack of ground-based monitoring points as in Argentina. Thus, the use of satellite products validated with ground-based measurements allows to geographically extending the analysis to regions without terrain instruments. The aim of this work is to evaluate the monthly mean of daily UVA product from CERES (CERES_SYN1deg) by mean of comparisons with ground-based measurements from UVA radiometers in four sites of the SAVER-net along Argentina for different periods, depending on the available ground-based dataset. The CERES monthly mean daily UVA presents very good correlation with respect to ground-based instruments for all sites with correlation coefficients higher than 0.98. The maximum mean bias error reaches ~21% in the worst case. Although it is needed longer ground-based datasets to validate satellite data, we can conclude that the monthly daily mean UVA from CERES presents good agreement with respect to ground-based measurements. Finally, monthly climatology was calculated and maps of these parameters were developed to analyse the seasonal variability along Argentina.