Investigations of association among atmospheric radionuclide measurements

Large networks producing frequent atmospheric radionuclide measurements have additional power in characterizing and localizing radionuclide release events over the analysis performed with four or fewer radionuclide measurements. However, adding unrelated measurements to an analysis dilutes that advantage, unless source-term models are extended to account for this complexity. A key steppingstone to obtaining network power is to select a group of related sample measurements that are associated with a release event. Such collections of measurements can be assembled by an analyst, or perhaps they can be selected by algorithm. The authors explore, using a year of atmospheric transport calculations and realistic sensor sensitivities, the potential for a computed radionuclide association tool.