UV Index 🇲🇽Mexico

Mexico stretches from roughly 14.5°N at its southern border with Guatemala to about 32.7°N at the United States line, with the Tropic of Cancer cutting through the middle of the country and dividing it into tropical and subtropical zones. Because most of the population lives south of that parallel, the sun climbs close to the zenith for much of the year, and the World Health Organization notes that solar UV intensity rises sharply as latitude approaches the equator and as the sun sits higher in the sky.

What sets Mexico apart is altitude on top of low latitude. Mexico City sits at about 2,240 m above sea level in the Valley of Mexico, surrounded by peaks above 5,000 m, and Pico de Orizaba (Citlaltépetl) reaches 5,636 m as the highest point in the country. The WHO notes that UV levels rise with altitude because thinner air absorbs less radiation, so the central plateau combines a near-tropical sun angle with a thinned atmosphere — a regime that produces some of the strongest ground-level UV anywhere outside the high Andes.

Mexico sits at #67 of 191 in the WHO's global ambient-UV ranking with about 4,974 J/m² of average daily UV, around the 65th percentile worldwide.