PRELIMINARY MODEL OF PLUTONIUM TRANSPORT BY WIND AT TRINITY SITE A. F. Gallegos Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico ABSTRACT A preliminary analysis of available data from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory ground zero (GZ) study area at Trinity Site is discussed in an effort to develop a wind-driven plutonium transport model. The analysis reveals a dominant effect of precipitation in explaining variation in the data, although its product with normalized solar radiation pattern gives a much lower sum of squared residuals (SSR) from the regression line. The square of the average diurnal windspeed at the site was also observed to reduce the SSR further, but not to the extent expected relative to other factors. Failure to find significant plutonium concentration differences in collected dust (as a function of time and sampling height of Bagnold sampler collectors) made possible the formulation of a prediction equation for plutonium flux at GZ, using the product of the predicted dust flux at the site with the mean plutonium concentration for the dust samples analyzed. INTRODUCTION An objective of the Trinity Site studies is to characterize environmental transport processes governing the distribution of plutonium initially deposited as a result of fallout from the atomic bomb test in 1945 (Larson et al., 1951; Hakonson and Johnson, 1974). Studies were begun on wind-driven soil transport processes using Bagnold dust samplers. This report summarizes dust flux data for ground zero (GZ) site location 1.6 km northeast of the Trinity crater along the fallout pathway, and examines the relationship between soil flux and plutonium flux, as well as other environmental parameters, using analysis of variance and regression analysis methods. 681