Comments on the revised paper “Bayesian inverse modeling and source location of an unintended I-131 release in Europe in the fall of 2011” by O. Tichy et al.
The revised paper discusses the issues raised by the review and has considerably improved. However, there is still the overestimation and the timing of the source term that cannot be reproduced very well with the given boundary conditions. It might be worth adding to the discussion, that possibly the station Budapest, which seems to be very important for the estimation, and its small distance to the release point might be the main reason for the tendency to overestimate the source term in general. With the resolution of 0.5x0.5 or 1x1 degree, the concentration in such a box – which is the average over the whole box – cannot reproduce the real gradient of the concentration up to several kilometres. Therefore, the source term might need to be overestimated to obtain a mean concentration in that first box that fits to a location that is very close to the source. In this respect, applying the dispersion models with a higher resolution – not changing the meteorology – might result in a more accurate estimation of the source term. To limit the computational effort, one may reduce the area of interest to cover just the monitoring stations. As this might be a serious amount of work it is not requested to perform it for this article but to consider it possibly in a forthcoming study. |