Experimental verification for real-time environmental emergency response system; WSPEEDI by European tracer experiment

Furuno, Akiko; Terada, Hiroaki; Chino, Masamichi; Yamazawa, Hiromi*

Atmospheric Environment, 38(40), p.6989 - 6998, 2004/12

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2004.02.074

We have been developing the computer-based emergency response system WSPEEDI which predicts long-range atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides discharged into the atmosphere due to a nuclear accident. The first version of WSPEEDI has a shortage that the spatial and temporal variation of the atmospheric boundary layer was very simply parameterized. Therefore we have developed the new version accomplished with the atmospheric dynamic model, in which the turbulent diffusivity in the mixing layer is calculated with a turbulence closure model. This paper describes the results of performance evaluation of the new version of WSPEEDI by comparing the simulation results with the European Tracer Experiment data. As a result of the verification, it was shown that the increase in the horizontal resolution largely improved the accuracy of the model prediction. The use of the turbulence closure model instead of the simple parameterization largely contributed to improve reproducibility of horizontal distribution of plumes.