Oscillation-free source term inversion of atmospheric radionuclide releases with joint model bias corrections and non-smooth competing priors

Details

• Journal Title:
  Journal of Hazardous Materials
• Personal Author:
  Fang, Sheng ; Dong, Xinwen ; Zhuang, Shuhan ; Tian, Zhijie ; Chai, Tianfeng ; Xu, Yuhan ; Zhao, Yungang ; Sheng, Li ; Ye, Xuan ; Xiong, Wei
• NOAA Program & Office:
  OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) ; ARL (Air Resources Laboratory) ; CICS (Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites)
• Description:
  The source term of atmospheric radionuclide releases is essential for the hazardous consequence assessment and emergency response. However, the artificial release oscillations in the source term estimate remain a fundamental challenge and may deliver misleading information, because of the unavoidable model biases and observation uncertainties. We propose a new method that removes oscillations while recovering the release details. This method explicitly corrects the model biases using the joint correction model and compensates the observation uncertainties through non-smooth competing priors that involve two rival functions. The new priors better model the unsteady feature of the radionuclide releases and distinguish the true releases from oscillations, enabling release-preserving oscillation removal. We extend the projected alternating minimization algorithm for an efficient solution. The method achieves oscillation-free and nearly perfect profiles for real releases of the Perfluoro-Methyl-Cyclo-Hexane on continental and regional scales, and the radionuclide 41Ar on a local scale, outperforming state-of-the-art and very recent methods. The sensitivities to model inputs and key parameters are also investigated. Robust performance is exhibited under emissions of both radioactive and non-radioactive substances, different meteorological inputs and numbers of observations, paving the way for identifying dynamic atmospheric radionuclide releases at multiple scales, especially when the release status is unknown.
• Source:
  Journal of Hazardous Materials, 440, 129806
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2022.129806
• ISSN:
  0304-3894
• Format:
  PDF
• Publisher:
  Elsevier BV
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Rights Information:
  Accepted Manuscript
• Compliance:
  Submitted
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:c0840776627e46b84c497266a80883d67db9626458a2764928ca58ead3f83bc23e9db7a726b286e11966a47530a5a9bc0dfbc805dc55e2187b4478c7e0f2b2c9
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61744/noaa_61744_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 2.84 MB ]