One morning the citizins of Aalborg, Denmark woke up to
a thick, black smoke coming from Aalborg Portland cement factory.
The smoke came from a warehouse with large piles of paper and
cardboard. The alarm sounded shortly before eight o'clock in the
morning, and the fire had a good hold when firefighters arrived.
The firefighters managed to limit the fire, so only half of the warehouse, which is of 8000 square meters, has been damaged. No people are hurt. It still burning, but the smoke was not toxic, according to the police. The cause of the fire is still unknown.
If the smoke had been toxic ARGOS would have used to simulate how the smoke would develop and dispurse over a certain period of time.
ARGOS was used to simulation and investigates the potential
consequences for Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) that is a highly contagious viral disease of cloven-hoofed domesticated and wild animals.
The FMD disease is spread in relation to two outbreaks; Burnside Farm, Heddon-on-the-Wall and Prestwick Hall Farm, Ponteland,
Northumberland.
The highly contagious nature of FMD is a reflection of the wide range of host species, the enormous quantities of virus liberated by infected animals, 5 the range of excretions and secretions which can be infectious, the stability of the virus in the environment, the multiplicity of routes of infection and the very small doses of the virus that can initiate infection.
Read article about Biological Incident response
Read article about Foot and Mounth Dicease Virus Transmission
In recent years, the concern for protection of urban populations
against terror attacks involving radiological, biological or chemical substances has attracted increasing attention. This sets new
demands to decision support and consequence assessment tools, where the focus has traditionally been on accidental exposure.
The ARGOS decision support system is able to estimation the consequences of terror attacks involving chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological substances. Different scientific paper presents elements of the framework that is applied in ARGOS to calculate the dose contributions from contaminants dispersed in the atmosphere after a ‘dirty bomb’ explosion. Also the aerosolisation and atmospheric dispersion in a city of different types of conceivable contaminants from a ‘dirty bomb’ can be simulated.
Read article "Dirty bomb explosion in an urban area".
Read article "Radiological terrorist attack in a city"
The ARGOS system has been in production at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) since 2005.
The system is a support to the national radiological and nuclear emergency preparedness and response and the use of scheduled
atmospheric dispersion calculations through ArgosWeb have increased the efficiency in providing swift recommendations on
protective actions to the incident commanders or other decision makers. SSM is also routinely performing external long
range atmospheric modeling with the dispersion model MATCH at SMHI and performs subsequent dose calculations for the
retrieved dispersion results inside ARGOS.
Furthermore, the batch run mode in the system has been extensively used in recent years for different investigations as described in, for example, SSM report 2017:27e Review of Swedish emergency planning zones and distances (link) and SSM report 2023:05e Radiological Consequences of Fallout from Nuclear Explosions (link) .
The National Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents (NEPNA) –
has been used ARGOS since 2007 and provides a framework for co-ordinating the emergency response to large scale nuclear
incidents with the potential to contaminate a wide area in Ireland.
NEPNA use ARGOS to outlines emergency notification and alerting, responsibilities of the relevant State bodies, interagency coordination, implementation of countermeasures and communication with the public.
The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) has assigned particular functions to covering early warning, technical assessment of the incident and provision of technical advice on countermeasures and monitoring of the environment and the food chain.
Contact PDC-ARGOS for detailled paper.
ARGOS has been used in many scenarios and incidents, and various articles have been written about ARGOS, and the list includes:
Hazelwood Open Cut Mine Fire
ARGOS use During the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster
ARGOS Use During Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP 15)
and
ARGOS Use During Winter Olympics in Canada 2010.
Big Fire in Landfill with Poisonous Smoke
ARGOS in Australia for USA-193 Satellite Re-entry Scenarios
Aalborg Portland Fire
Requirements for estimation of doses from contaminants dispersed by a ‘dirty bomb’ explosion in an urban area
Calculating the consequences of recovery, a European model for inhabited areas
Implementation in ARGOS of ERMIN and AGRICP
ARGOS Decision Support System for Emergency Management
Estimation of Health Hazards Resulting from a Radiological Terrorist Attack in Urban Cities
http://ec.europa.eu/echo/civil_protection/civil/pdfdocs/d_03_hoe.pdf
http://fumapex.dmi.dk/Pub/uaqifs/Copenhagen_emergency.pdf
When a major disaster happens, we need a solution we can trust! Since 1996 DEMA has used ARGOS in the Danish emergency preparedness and response.
Mr. Steen Hoe from
Danish Emergency Management Agency
ARGOS/RIMPUFF has the advantage that the source term can vary in time and that the spatial domain can have varying land-use and terrain heights. We get outputs for each time-step, rather than an overall solution and NWP data can be used, so the model can more accurately reflect the changes in meteorological conditions that occur – which is absolutely necessary”
Mr. Blake Orr
ARPANSA, Australia