Publications Details
Assessment of the Meteorological Characterization Used in the ADROIT Code
The ADROIT Analysis of Dispersal Risk Qccurring in transportation code is the primary tool used to perform probabilistic risk assessments for the Transportation Safeguards Division of the Department of Energy. The current version of ADROIT uses a Pasquill-Gifford stability-class approach to meteorological characterization. In order to assess the affect that this simplified approach to weather characterization has on ADROIT'S predictions of consequence and risk, the Pasquill-Gifford stability-class approach was replaced with a direct use of radiosonde data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). A comparison of results obtained for the two weather characterizations shows that, under certain circumstances, the use of the stability-class approach can result in a significant underprediction of consequence and risk values. Since such an underprediction is non-consewative, it is recommended that the stability-class approach currently used by ADROIT be replaced with a more detailed characterization of meteorological conditions. Specifically, the NCDC database was found to have sufllcient temporal and spatial resolution for ADROIT applications. Understanding that an attempt to use of all of the NCDC data in ADROIT would be prohibitive, a sampling scheme is presented as a viable alternative for instituting the recommendation of this study.