Developed in the 1970’s, the Brewer instruments still form the worldwide backbone (map) for the monitoring of the state of the ozone layer from the ground. Holographic gratings ensure the wavelength selection in these instruments. A PC controls the operation of the spectrometers. This enables unattended automatic observation schemes, including the data analysis and data transfer. In this way, it is possible to show automatically recent ozone data on the website of the institute.
The Brewer instrument also measures the UV intensities falling on a horizontal surface. From these measurements, the actual UV index can be calculated.
RMI maintains three Brewer instruments. Brewers #016 and #178 operate side by side at the main RMI site in Uccle, while Brewer #100 performs ozone and UV observations at the Princess Elisabeth Station in Antarctica. To assure the quality of the measurements the instruments are recalibrated with an international reference instrument on a regular basis, as recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Our instruments are integrated in the European network EUBREWNET. The data are also stored at the World Ozone and Ultraviolet radiation Data Centre of WMO.