The Austrian emergency response modelling system TAMOS

The emergency response modelling system TAMOS has been developed to predict dispersion and deposition of radioactive material in case of an accident at a nuclear power plant in the vicinity of Austria. The modelling system consists of a prognostic long-range transport and dispersion model and a diagnostic wind field and trajectory model. The long-range dispersion model was intercompared with other emergency response models in the European real time modelling exercise RTMOD. Two hypothetical atmospheric releases, one from Chernobyl and the other from London were simulated. The forecasts of surface concentrations were evaluated by an automated statistical evaluation package at the European Community's Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra (Mosca et al., 1998a). In general calculated concentrations from TAMOS compare well or are higher than those of the other emergency response models. For example the 75 percentile is within one order of magnitude with 14 models (out of 19) in experiment 1 and 15 models (out of 17) in experiment 2. Also cloud movement is captured well: during the whole 48 hour forecasting period the computed concentration fields cover at least part of the area with a confidence in contamination level of 80 to 100 % in both experiments. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.