A Radiation Weather Station: Development of a Continuous Monitoring System for the Collection, Analysis, and Display of Environmental Radiation Data

Abstract

Due to heightened fear surrounding the possibility of future terrorism involving nuclear weapons and radiological dispersive devices, compounded by nonroutine nuclear power plant releases such as from emergencies or accidents, interest in contamination levels of environmental radiation has spiked. This project sought to develop a continuously operational radiation-monitoring system, with graphically visualized data easily accessible to the public. Because this continuing project is housed at a university facility, it bears no connection to perceived political or commercial interests, generally increasing the credibility of the endeavor. Outdoor weather and radiation parameters were gathered by sensors installed on the rooftop of a two-story building. A display and cloud service website was used to project the live data in an understandable format. A correlation was observed between weather and visibly heightened levels of gamma radiation. The goal of this paper is to share and highlight the overall hardware selection and the unique software challenges encountered when developing a robust collection and analysis system, along with the challenges of displaying meteorological and radiological data in a clear and concise fashion.

Localizing hot spots in Poisson radiation data matrices: nonnegative tensor factorization and phase congruency

“…Fixed-position sensor systems are popular (cf. [1,2]) and there is increasing use of mobile sensors-ground-based [3-6], on aerial platforms [6-8], or combinations of both [9,10].A two-stage radiation monitoring system has acquisition and digitization of sensor data in a first stage followed by data processing in a second stage (cf. [10]).…”

“…Fixed-position sensor systems are popular (cf. [1,2]) and there is increasing use of mobile sensors-ground-based [3-6], on aerial platforms [6-8], or combinations of both [9,10].…”