Lol well I do love star trek references
A few things I wanted to hit on. Whether you're 3000m in elevation or 2m in elevation a 10 UV index will be pretty much the same regardless.
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The UV index is a measuremt of UVB in 3 WV spots (295nm, 305nm & 325nm) with each WV given different weight on the final calculation than the other. This is due to the the absorption rate of UV light on most molecules.
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The smaller the WV the more easily it is absorbed by water, DNA, ect, so the smaller the WV the greater the weight on calculated UV index. Australia is not very high elevation but has UV indexes of 14+! So UV index may correlate sometimes with elevation but it is actually only dependent on real life UVB radiation measurements regardless of elevation.
I'd have to ask for some data showing that 1000m elevation outdoors isn't enough UVB to notice a difference. They grow weed here in California pretty well and that's about sea level. Even vulcans will sunburn at the beach lol
μ (micro) = 1×10^(-6)
m (milli) = 1×10^(-3)
100μw/cm2 = 1w/m2
450μw/cm2 = 4.5w/m2 which is more than 8× more UVB radiation than a 10.6 UV index. I'm not sure what UV index that would correspond too.
500μw/m2 = 0.0005w/m2 and isn't very much UVB.
It'd be nice to have a PC UV chip, but 290ish nm chips are dismal effeciency and you'd have to use that as your pump because you can't upgrade photons. I think the best LED UV will be more than 2 WV. I'm trying to include as many as I can. So far I've found 305nm, 310nm, 320nm, 340nm, 365nm, 385nm, and 395nm.
I agree about 285nm. I want to try, but like you said I think there's benefit to a wider SPD. So if I'm going wide I'll have to include the other WVs anyways, so personally I'm going to try to reach into 290ish with my 305nm leg, but that's about as far as I'm going for targeting 285nm this time around. If I wasn't including other WVs then I think 1 or 2 chips of 285nm would achieve UVR8 activation like you enlightened me to in some of your earlier knowledge dumps
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index
EDIT:
They weight the area under the UV portion of the SPD towards 295 at 100% and 325nm at 0.3% I think they go all the way till 400nm at true 0% (exponential scale). Then this weighted quantity of UV radiation is divided by 25mw/m2 to determine UV index.
So
@Randomblame I believe my total radiation comparison in a 10.6 UV index day at 0.55w/m2 is off because I don't know the actual quantity (area under curve) from 290nm - 400nm, I only know 3 WV intensities. Looks like you'll have to downgrade my Vulcan status aha
I guess the take away for me is that UV index is a decent gauge imo when calculating a doseage range of UVB radiation, but that UV index says little about the quantity of UVA present.