UV Index 🇧🇧Barbados

Barbados is a small coral-limestone island in the eastern Caribbean, lying between roughly 13.0° and 13.3° north latitude and about 100 km east of the Windward Islands chain. The terrain is gently undulating, rising from coastal terraces to a central highland that culminates at Mount Hillaby at 336 metres, the island's highest point. Its tropical latitude means the noon sun passes nearly overhead for much of the year, giving consistently short solar paths and minimal seasonal variation in day length.

Barbados hosts the Ragged Point AGAGE atmospheric monitoring station on its windward eastern tip, where clean marine air arriving on the easterly trade winds is sampled for greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting species relevant to stratospheric UV. The same trade winds drive scattered cumulus that produce sharp swings in surface UV through the day, while the long west-coast beaches of fine white coral sand raise local albedo and reflected UV exposure. The Barbados Meteorological Service publishes a daily UV index for the island.

Barbados sits at #9 of 191 in the WHO's global ambient-UV ranking with about 5,787 J/m² of average daily UV, around the 96th percentile worldwide.