LAPMOD

LAPMOD is a Lagrangian particle model used to simulate the atmospheric dispersion and removal of radioactive or inert species. The model is directly interfaced to the CALMET diagnostic meteorological model (the EPA recommended CALPUFF's meteorological processor), therefore it is capable to simulate the atmospheric dispersion over complex orography. LAPMOD can also use, via its meteorological processor LAPMET, the same meteorological input files of EPA recommended AERMOD air quality model. LAPMOD simulates the release from a number of source types: buoyant and non-buoyant point sources, linear sources, circular sources, volumetric sources (parallelepipeds and spheres). LAPMOD calculates averaged and integrated concentration and dry and wet deposition fields. In case of radioactive releases, these fields can be used for calculating the doses (cloudshine, groundshine and dose due to inhalation). Particles can be tracked to study the atmospheric flow. LAPMOD has been validated against the data of the Kincaid, Indianapolis and Praire Grass experiments. LAPMOD has a GIS-based graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows which allows to load vector and raster images. The output files for concentration and deposition are produced by LAPMOD in ASCII Surfer GRD or ASCII ESRI GRD format, and they can be directly loaded by the GUI. The GUI allows the user to transform the output fields and the particle positions in ESRI shapefiles, which can then rapidly visualised. LAPMOD is interely written in Fortran, therefore it can be compiled and used on any platform (UNIX, Linux, Windows, ...). The LAPMOD GUI can be used only under Windows. A trial version of the LAPMOD GUI will be soon available for download. More information about the LAPMOD model is available upon request.