Abstract
Abstract. Low concentrations of 106Ru were detected across Europe at the turn of September and October 2017. The origin of 106Ru has still not been confirmed; however, current studies agree that the release occurred probably near Mayak in the southern Urals. The source reconstructions are mostly based on an analysis of concentration measurements coupled with an atmospheric transport model. Since reasonable temporal resolution of concentration measurements is crucial for proper source term reconstruction, the standard 1-week sampling interval could be limiting. In this paper, we present an investigation of the usability of the newly developed AMARA (Autonomous Monitor of Atmospheric Radioactive Aerosol) and CEGAM (carousel gamma spectrometry) real-time monitoring systems, which are based on the gamma-ray counting of aerosol filters and allow for determining the moment when 106Ru arrived at the monitoring site within approx. 1 h and detecting activity concentrations as low as several mBq m−3 in 4 h intervals. These high-resolution data were used for inverse modeling of the 106Ru release. We perform backward runs of the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) atmospheric transport model driven with meteorological data from the Global Forecast System (GFS), and we construct a source–receptor sensitivity (SRS) matrix for each grid cell of our domain. Then, we use our least squares with adaptive prior covariance (LS-APC) method to estimate possible locations of the release and the source term of the release. With Czech monitoring data, the use of concentration measurements from the standard regime and from the real-time regime is compared, and a better source reconstruction for the real-time data is demonstrated in the sense of the location of the source and also the temporal resolution of the source. The estimated release location, Mayak, and the total estimated source term, 237±107 TBq, are in agreement with previous studies. Finally, the results based on the Czech monitoring data are validated with the IAEA-reported (International Atomic Energy Agency) dataset with a much better spatial resolution, and the agreement between the IAEA dataset and our reconstruction is demonstrated. In addition, we validated our findings also using the FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion) model coupled with meteorological analyses from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
Highlights
At the turn of September and October 2017, low concentrations of 106Ru of unknown origin were detected in the atmosphere in the Czech Republic
The aims of our experiments are to estimate the location of the 106Ru source, to estimate the source term, and to compare results obtained using four datasets from the Czech Radiation Monitoring Network introduced in Sect. 2 and with results obtained using the dataset reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (IAEA, 2017)
We aim to demonstrate that a better time resolution of measurement is beneficial independently on the used atmospheric transport model and the used timeresolution
Summary
At the turn of September and October 2017, low concentrations of 106Ru of unknown origin were detected in the atmosphere in the Czech Republic. Immediate communication with other European laboratories involved in the RO5 (Ring of Five) network (Masson et al, 2011) confirmed that this was a Europe-wide occurrence. The concentration was low (tens of mBq m−3) and was of no health risk, the unknown origin of 106Ru raised concerns. Very shortly after the first detections, efforts were made to estimate the source location based on the RO5 data. Initial analyses pointed to a possible source located to the east of the Czech Republic. This estimate was refined to the Ural region as the most probable location (Kovalets and Romanenko, 2017).
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