Dispersion and deposition of fallout from nuclear testing @ B. E. Moroz Er AL.

263

Salt Lake City —__

Denver
e

“42

St. George

HYSPLIT fallout pattern
Cederwall arrival time

Fig. 3. HYSPLIT fallout pattern resulting from simulations of the Upshot-Knothole Harry test. The solid black line
indicates the estimated centerline of the radioactive cloud as simulated by Cederwall and Peterson (1990). Dashedlines
delineate the HYSPLIT predictions of the geographic boundary ofthe fallout pattern at the time noted.

were strong northeasterly winds estimated at 47-60 km
h' with almost no wind shear (Shoikhet et al. 1998;
Imanaka et al. 2005).

given in Table 1. The release heights in the simulation
ranged from 450 m AGLto the reported maximum cloud

HYSPLIT simulations were performed to compare

height, ~9 km, and are shown in Table 8. The cloud
bottom, estimated at 2.7 km, was based on the reported

published estimates of the fallout pattern and the spatial

particle sizes varied from 5 wm up to 300 wm, in 5 wm

predicted estimates of '’Cs deposition density with
distribution of '*’Cs and ****°Pu near the village of

Dolon, Kazakhstan. Fallout was reported to have reached
Dolon, approximately 118 km northeast of ground zero,
at roughly H+2 h (Yamamotoet al. 2008; Gordeevetal.
2002). Soil samples were collected in 2005 by
Yamamoto et al. (2008) at 21 locations along a line

approximately perpendicular to the supposed centerline

of the plume. Their analyses of '’Cs and *?”*°Pu
suggested that (1) the spatial distribution of '*’Cs and
Py is roughly Gaussian in shape and perpendicular
to the axis of the fallout trajectory with maximums
located near the supposedaxis-center, and (2) the width
of the fallout pattern near Dolon was approximately
8-10 km (Yamamotoetal. 2008).

To calculate the fallout deposition at locations
downwind, particle releases at varying altitudes were
simulated using HYSPLIT. The total numberofparticles
in the simulated debris cloud was apportioned using the

estimated total '°’Cs activity, particle size, and spatial

distribution model described previously for the Marshall
Islands simulations as well as the alternate distributions

cloud dimensions of the Trinity test. The assumed

increments, depending on the activity distribution, and
the simulation wascarried out to 5 h post-detonation. The
total numberof particles tracked in different simulations

varied from 1 X 10’ to 2.5 x 10’.

Results. The calculated '°’Cs deposition pattern for

the first Soviet nuclear detonation, using the MI '’’Cs
activity-size distribution from Table 1, is shownin Fig.4.

The simulation data were griddedat a resolution of ~4.3
km*. Sites A, B, and C in Fig. 4 correspond to the
Table8. Particle release heights andfraction of total '*’Cs activity
corresponding to each release height for the first test at the
Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.
Release height
(m AGL)
450
2,875
3,925
5,150
7,075
8,125

to
to
to
to
to
to

2,700
3,750
4,800
6,900
7,950
9,000

Height increment
(m AGL)

Fraction of total
BICs activity

450
175
175
350
175
175

0.12
0.10
0.16
0.36
0.16
0.10

Select target paragraph3