UV Index 🇧🇪Belgium

Belgium spans roughly 49.5°N to 51.5°N, a narrow mid-latitude band in northwestern Europe between France, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg. The country is mostly low and flat, with the coastal plain and central plateaus sitting near sea level and only the Ardennes in the southeast rising above 500 m, peaking at the Signal de Botrange at 694 m. Because of this northern latitude and modest elevation, the solar zenith angle stays comparatively high even in midsummer, giving Belgium a moderate UV regime that climbs sharply from April to a June–July peak before declining through autumn.

Belgium hosts one of Europe's longest continuous ground-based UV records: the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) has measured spectral ultraviolet irradiance and the UV Index at its Uccle observatory in Brussels since the early 1990s, complementing an even older Dobson total-ozone series that began in 1971. RMI uses these datasets to issue the daily UV Index forecast for Belgium, to monitor long-term trends linked to stratospheric ozone recovery, and to feed European UV climatology efforts. The Uccle record makes Belgium a reference site for tracking how clouds, aerosols and ozone shape surface UV across the maritime northwest of the continent.

Belgium sits at #185 of 191 in the WHO's global ambient-UV ranking with about 1,645 J/m² of average daily UV, around the 3rd percentile worldwide.