About uvindex.au

Draft. Brandan to review before launch.

uvindex.au is a free, independent website that shows the ultraviolet (UV) index for 32 Australian cities and towns, plus a 1° forecast grid across the continent. It is built and hosted in Australia.

Methodology

• City values: hourly UV index for each town comes from the Open-Meteo forecast API and is refreshed about every 10 minutes. The current hour is worked out in each town's own time zone, including the half-hour zones (Adelaide, Darwin, Alice Springs).
• Map grid: a regular 1° grid of land points (up to 700) is fetched from Open-Meteo about every 3 hours. Values between grid points are bilinear-interpolated from the four nearest points. Interpolated values are labelled as such.
• Recorded / Live / Forecast: earlier hours today are labelled Recorded, the current hour Live, and later hours Forecast. All of them are model values from Open-Meteo, not ground-sensor measurements.
• Forecast confidence: shown by lead time (high within 24 h, medium to 72 h, low beyond). The shaded band on charts is an indicative spread. It is not an ensemble forecast.
• Bands: Low 0–2, Moderate 3–5, High 6–7, Very high 8–10, Extreme 11+ (WHO UV index categories). Cancer Council recommends sun protection when the UV index is 3 or above.

Sources & licence

• UV data: Open-Meteo.com, licensed CC BY 4.0.
• Sun-safety guidance: Cancer Council Australia: UV Index.
• Coastline: Natural Earth 1:10m admin-0 (public domain), simplified for the web.
• Social preview photo: Unexpected Places on Unsplash (Jervis Bay, NSW). City photos are credited on each city page.
• Official UV forecasts and sun protection times: Bureau of Meteorology. WHO: UV index.
• Fonts: Inter and Instrument Serif, SIL Open Font Licence (Inter, Instrument Serif).

uvindex.au is not affiliated with ARPANSA, the Bureau of Meteorology or Cancer Council. For official sun protection times, see the BoM or the SunSmart app.