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The background of RTMOD was the 1994 ETEX project that involved about 50 models run in several Institutes around the world to simulate two real tracer releases involving a large part of the European territory. In the preliminary phase of ETEX, three dry runs (i.e. simulations in real-time of fictitious releases) were carried out. At that time, the World Wide Web was not available to all the exercise participants, and plume predictions were therefore submitted to JRC-Ispra by fax and regular mail for subsequent processing.
The rapid development of the World Wide Web in the second half of the nineties, together with the experience gained during the ETEX exercises suggested the development of this project. RTMOD featured a web-based user-friendly interface for data submission and an interactive program module for displaying, intercomparison and analysis of the forecasts. RTMOD has focussed on model intercomparison of concentration predictions at the nodes of a regular grid with 0.5 degrees of resolution both in latitude and in longitude, the domain grid extending from 5W to 40E, and 40N to 65N.
Hypothetical releases were notified around the world to the 28 model forecasters via the web on a one-day warning in advance. They then accessed the RTMOD web page for detailed information on the actual release, and as soon as possible they then uploaded their predictions to the RTMOD server and could soon after start their inter-comparison analysis with other modellers. When additional forecast data arrived, already existing statistical results would be recalculated to include the influence by all available predictions.
The new web-based RTMOD concept has proven useful as a practical decision-making tool for real-time communication between dispersion modellers around the World and for fast and standardised information exchange on the most probably contaminated areas. The project was conducted as a Concerted Action project with support from the European Commissions Nuclear Energy-Radiation Protection Research Program, under Contract No. FI4PCT97- 0068.
Read an abstract of the project. |