March/April 2011
During the Fukushima accident, ARGOS was used by the Consortium member organizations first of all to visualize the results of long range dispersion calculations.
This was performed in order to eliminate the fear of a radiological pollution over each organization’s homeland – even though most of the ARGOS users are situated quite far from Japan.
Secondly a number of local dispersion calculations were performed based on either local weather forecast data or global (more coarse) weather data. All calculations were performed using local high resolution terrain data as this was quickly provided to all ARGOS-users by Danish Technical University, an important ARGOS partner.
The local calculations were performed primarily in order to provide guidance to the citizens of each country working in or travelling to / from Japan. I.e. could airlines safely be landing in Japanese airports, could ships safely navigate Japanese waters and arrive at Japanese seaports? These decisions have serious consequences in cost and supply of critical resources.
For background information read Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
Slides from an
Australian presentation of using ARGOS.