[ RadSafe ] Met data

[Dukelow, James S Jr]

W E Joyce wrote:
-----------------
Jim,

I am also interested in meteorological data sets.  I am confused about
your instructions.  I went to the web site and didn't find anything
called "Datasets."  I found a "Data & Images" tab but didn't find
anything about a table of weather stations.  Could you help me?

In addition, is it possible to generate 50% and 95% worst met conditions
just looking at the raw data (wind speed, direction, stability, etc)?
Isn't the 50% and 95% values based on rankings of Chi/Q?


William E. Joyce
Senior Safety Engineer
ATL International, Inc
20010 Century Blvd, Suite 500
Germantown, MD 20874
Telephone: (301) 515-6792
Fax: (301) 972-6904
Email: wejoyce at atlintl.com

==================

Bill Joyce's confusion is reasonable, since I left out of my
instructions one of the GISS web site pages.

When you click on "Data & Images", you get a list of the different types
of data available.  Go down the list to Earth Observations --
Temperature and click on GISTEMP.  That will give you a screen with 6
map icons, one of which is labeled "Station Data".  Click on it and you
get a page with a map of the world.  Move your cursor to the part of the
world you are interested in and double click.  That, FINALLY, will give
you a list of weather stations near (typically within 500 to 1000 km)
the spot you click.  There is a mechanism for moving the center point of
that list of stations, in case you didn't hit precisely the part of the
world you were interested in with your cursor.

GISS has a variety of weather data, but does not appear to have wind
speed or direction data or atmospheric stability data.  Nuclear
utilities have had to collect a year or two of on-site wind and
stability data to support the part of their safety analysis process that
involves prediction of dispersion of releases.

Also, the GISS data will not generally give you medians, means,
percentiles, etc., which is why I gave instructions for importing the
GISS data text files into MS EXCEL.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow at pnl.gov