UV Index 🇧🇸Bahamas

The Bahamas is a subtropical-to-tropical archipelago stretched across the western Atlantic between roughly 20.9°N and 27.3°N, beginning just off the Florida coast and reaching south toward Hispaniola and Cuba. It comprises more than 700 low-lying limestone islands and cays, of which only a few dozen are inhabited, scattered over about 470,000 km² of ocean. The terrain is famously flat: the highest natural point in the entire country is Mount Alvernia on Cat Island at just 63 metres above sea level, leaving the islands fully exposed to the open-sky solar regime.

What makes the Bahamian UV environment unusual is not latitude alone but surface geometry. With virtually no elevation or terrain shading and a landscape dominated by white-sand beaches, exposed limestone, and vast shallow banks of turquoise water, ground and water albedo substantially boost the effective UV dose reaching skin and eyes. Persistent easterly trade winds drive scattered cumulus that produce highly variable cloud cover; the northern islands such as Grand Bahama tend to be cloudier and wetter than the drier southern Family Islands. The Bahamas Department of Meteorology issues the country's official weather and climate observations.

The Bahamas sits at #111 of 191 in the WHO's global ambient-UV ranking with about 4,119 J/m² of average daily UV, around the 42nd percentile worldwide.