The dispersion team focuses on the quantification of radioactive pollutant dispersion through the atmosphere or water bodies and evaluate associated consequences or risks. The spatial scale varies from the urban scale of a few tens of kilometres to long range of over 2000 kilometres. Our purpose is to build local capabilities capable of providing reliable and dependable insights of radioactive pollutants pathways in the environment for decision-makers and stakeholders. We also aim to establish recognition and reputation in the scientific community.

The team mainly utilise numerical models to help us better understand physical processes of the transport, dispersion, and deposition of radioactive pollutants under various environmental conditions and source release scenarios in our region. Most of these models are commonly used community ones such as the ARGOS, MACCS (MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System), HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model), and FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model). We also develop our own dispersion models to adopt refined grid mesh and to incorporate high-resolution local data which can be challenging for community models. These data include local weather observations, GIS information, and population density etc., which are critical for addressing urban scale dispersion problems.

For the source release, our team work closely with the severe accident simulation team for obtaining source terms from their simulations or analyses. Hypothetical sources are also frequently used in our studies. The environmental data that we have been using include local meteorological observations from NEA (National Environment Agency), gridded meteorological data from NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction), ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) or running regional model WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting model), and ocean current data from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).