Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States. NASA helps public health officials track the primary cause of the disease: overexposure to ultraviolet radiation.
The NASA Earth Applied Sciences Program and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the first publicly available map of ultraviolet (UV) radiation for all counties in the contiguous United States. This animation shows the average amount of UV radiation per square meter reaching the surface in different parts of the country in 2015—like a “risk map” showing the likelihood of sunburn in an area. The UV data comes from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA’s Aura satellite, processed by researchers at Emory University and University of Iowa.
Public health researchers can link the UV exposure indicator to skin cancer incidences. The dataset is available on the CDC’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking network.