Results of an emergency response atmospheric dispersion model comparison using a state accepted statistical protocol.

摘要

The Rocky Flats Plant, located approximately 26 km northwest of downtown Denver, Colorado, has developed an emergency response atmospheric dispersion model for complex terrain applications. Plant personnel would use the model, known as the Terrain-Responsive Atmospheric Code (TRAC) (Hodgin 1985) to project plume impacts and provide off-site protective action recommendations to the State of Colorado should a hazardous material release occur from the facility. The Colorado Department of Health (CDH) entered into an interagency agreement with the Rocky Flats Plant prime contractor, EG&G Rocky Flats, and the US Department of Energy to evaluate TRAC as an acceptable emergency response tool. After exhaustive research of similar evaluation processes from other emergency response and regulatory organizations, the interagency committee devised a formal acceptance process. The process contains an evaluation protocol (Hodgin and Smith 1992), descriptions of responsibilities, an identified experimental data set to use in the evaluation, and judgment criteria for model acceptance. The evaluation protocol is general enough to allow for different implementations. This paper explains one implementation, shows protocol results for a test case, and presents results of a comparison between versions of TRAC with different wind Field codes: a two dimensional mass consistent code called WINDS (Fosberg et al. 1976) that has been extended to three dimensions, and a fully 3 dimensional mass conserving code called NUATMOS (Ross and Smith 1987, Ross et al. 1988).