EURDEP: A standard data-format and network for exchanging radiological

monitoring data between 28 European countries

G. de Vries1, M. De Cort1, V. Tanner2

1 European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for

Environment and Sustainability, Ispra, Italy, http://rem.jrc.cec.eu.int 2 European Commission, DG Transport and Energy, Unit H.4,

Radiation protection, Luxembourg

Abstract

Triggered by its Member States the European Commission (EC) created the EUropean Radiological Data Exchange Platform (EURDEP) in 1994. The resulting EURDEP network is currently used by 28 European countries to exchange their radiological monitoring data in a standard data-format and in almost real-time. This paper gives an overview of the network, its data-format, the data exchanged and future plans. Keywords: radiological monitoring data, support for emergency response, international data-exchange, standard data-format for radiological monitoring data, EURDEP, ECURIE

1 Introduction

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986 triggered the need to improve the national radiological monitoring networks and increased the awareness that the rapid availability of monitoring data on international level could significantly reduce the delay for

taking appropriate counter-measures. To discuss the exchange of monitoring data at the European level, in 1994 the Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring (REM) group of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) organized a workshop that resulted in the EURDEP project. This paper aims to give more insight regarding:

o The data-format and the available monitoring data o The structure of the EURDEP network o The mechanisms implemented to improve the reliability o The relation to other emergency support systems o The obtained experiences.

In addition the paper will describe the planned improvements and enhancements.

2 Current status

Today, at the end of 2005, EURDEP is both a common data-format for radiological monitoring data as well as a data-exchange network used by 28 European countries. Most of the data come from some 3900 monitoring stations that measure ambient gamma dose-rate. In addition there are 12 stations sending 131I measurements, 28 stations sending 214Pb, 11 stations sending total-α and 33 stations sending total-β (in air, river water, water treatment plants and deposition) measurements. The minimum requirement for participation to EURDEP is to make data available in a standard format, once a day during routine and each two hours during an emergency. The growing trend however is to exchange data continuously in an hourly or two-hourly frequency, which is currently implemented by 13 of the 28 data providers. The data of the 28 countries is made available to all participating organizations and competent authorities by Email, ftp and through a protected website. In addition part of the data is available on a public website. The total amount of stored measurements since 2002 is about 16.300.000 and increases by approximately 50.000 measurements per day. The file containing all measurements of one day in the EURDEP format and with the system running in the routine mode, has a size of about 10 MByte. Compressed (ZIP) files may also be used for data distribution and as a comparison, the same daily file as mentioned before has a file-size of less than 1 MByte after zipping.

The EURDEP network has obtained a legal status for the EU Member States because it may be used to send environmental monitoring as required under the Council Decision 87/600 Euratom [1]). Two major advantages of using the EURDEP network compared to manually entering the monitoring data in the ECURIE[2] (European Community Urgent Radiological Information Exchange) system are saving time and resources during an emergency and the availability of more monitoring data with shorter delay. The application of EURDEP during an emergency raised the need for high reliability and data-availability. The way this reliability has been achieved is discussed in the Chapter 6 Reliability issues. The network has been operative for many years now and achieved a good degree of maturity.

3 The EURDEP data-format

A complete description of the format can be found in the EURDEP 2.0 Reference Manual [3]. An example of the format with some of its characteristics is given in figure 1.

Tags for begin and end of a EURDEP file

Generic information

Optional indication of constants

Begin and end-of-line tokens for easy parsing

Monitoring data in order as indicated in Field_list

Station index

Optional properties of monitoring station

Figure 1: Example of EURDEP data

4 Participating countries and characteristics

Country Representative measuring period (h) (*)

Transmission interval (h) (*)

Transmission protocol

No. stations

Austria 24:00 24:00 ftp 339 Belgium 01:00 24:00 ftp 131 Bulgaria 00:10 06:00 ftp 38 Czech Republic 01:00 01:00 Mirror 48 Germany 24:00 01:00 Mirror 2206 Denmark 01:00 02:00 Mirror 16 Estonia 01:00 01:00 Mirror 10 Spain 00:10 24:00 Email 32 Finland 00:20 01:00 Mirror 280 France 00:05 12:00 ftp 179 Great Britain 01:00 01:00 ftp 104 Croatia 00:30 06:00 Mirror 12 Hungary 00:30 06:00 ftp 125 Ireland 01:00 01:00 Mirror 12 Iceland 00:15 03:00 Mirror 1 Italy 01:00 24:00 Mirror 51 Lithuania 01:00 00:10 Mirror 12 Luxembourg 01:00 02:00 ftp 19 Latvia 01:00 01:00 Mirror 15 Netherlands 24:00 01:00 ftp 177 Norway 01:00 24:00 ftp 30 Poland 01:00 06:00 Mirror 14 Portugal 00:10 24:00 ftp 13 Romania 24:00 24:00 Email 69 Russia 00:10 24:00 ftp 122 Sweden 00:15 02:00 Mirror 37 Slovenia 00:30 01:00 Mirror 44 Slovak Republic 24:00 24:00 Mirror 24 Figure 2: Overview of data-transmission characteristics of the EURDEP participants

(*) Indicated times are valid for routine operation. During an emergency all transmission intervals should be 02:00 hours or less.

The table in Figure 2 clearly shows that there is not yet a consistent and harmonized representative measuring period for ambient gamma-dose measurements. This topic will be on the agenda of the next EURDEP workshop, planned for 7-9 June 2006.

5 The architecture of the network and its data-flow

5.1 Introduction

The initial topology of EURDEP was a star-network with the DG-JRC in Ispra, Italy as the central node. At the very beginning of the project all data were sent in the various national data-formats to the JRC by Email, where the contributions were aggregated to a single data-set that was made available to the participants. In a second time, the ftp protocol was introduced and used in parallel to Email for the submission of the data. Email and ftp did however not offer much protection against unauthorized persons submitting fake EURDEP data. In addition the star-network topology made the entire network fully dependant on the JRC. Therefore a study [4]

was made in 2000 to find a more appropriate way for reliably exchanging the monitoring data. The recommendations from that study triggered the migration toward a distributed pull-network, where all data-providers would make their data available on a local ftp-server and data would be downloaded with mirroring software and using the ftp protocol. As can be seen from figure 2, there are already 15 countries that make their data available on a local ftp-server. The distributed pull network can co-exist with the ongoing data-transmissions by ftp and Email because all the measurements are in the same data-format and are aggregated at the JRC. Because of the flexibility of the distributed network topology, the creation of an additional central node is extremely easy: it is sufficient to a) change the local configuration settings in order to mirror data from all data-providers and b) to make all this data available in the appropriate directories on a local ftp-server. The Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz (BfS) in Freiburg, Germany became the second central node of the EURDEP network in 2004

5.2 How the the pull-system works

The two major requirements for the pull-system are to 1) make national monitoring data available to the EURDEP network and 2) obtain monitoring data of other countries from the network. To make its monitoring data available, an Organization needs to create an ftp-server that is permanently connected to Internet and copy its national monitoring data in a predefined directory. This directory shall have read-only access (with userid and password protection) for all participants. For enhanced protection, IP-address filtering can be applied. The mirroring software running at the JRC will upload any new data from these data-directories in a 10 minute interval. All new data will be made available on the ftp-server of the JRC where they can be mirrored by any participant. In addition the new data is stored in the EURDEP database and can be downloaded through the EURDEP web-site. Any country that wishes to automatically and rapidly obtain data from any country or from the JRC should mirror the appropriate directories on their ftp-server. The required mirroring software is freely available through the JRC and is simple to configure. The configuration settings determine the countries from which data is collected and if this data is collected directly from the individual data-providers or from the central providers that have data from all countries (JRC and BfS). It is also possible to configure automatic fail-over i.e. to indicate the collection of specific data from both the original data-provider and the central providers, so that in case one of the nodes is off-line, data will be collected anyway. Another important feature of the pull mechanism is that any country during an accident can decide to collect data from more locations and/or in a higher polling frequency by changing the local configuration, so without the need to submit requests to staff in other Organizations that may be under pressure because of the emergency situation. This simple approach has proven to be easy, reliable and flexible.

5.3 Data-flow example

Country A makes its national monitoring data available on a local ftp-server. The JRC software checks for new data each 10 minutes and downloads it. The new data is loaded in the EURDEP central

database and the new data becomes visible through the EURDEP website from where it can be downloaded. In addition the data becomes available on the JRC ftp-server and is sent by Email to subscribers. The data from Country A is also mirrored by the BfS, where the data from Country A, together with the data from all other countries, is made available on the BfS ftp-server. The data from Country A is most likely also directly mirrored by its neighborhood countries. This example shows that any country interested in collecting data from Country A has the choice between directly mirroring it from the ftp-server of country A or do the same from any of the central nodes, being it the JRC or the BfS. Because of this redundancy the data-exchange will not stop if one or more of the nodes of the network are not working.

6 Reliability issues

Because the system has to be used during accidents, its reliability is of utmost importance. The following characteristics were implemented to increase the reliability of the network:

1) Data-providers were asked to stop sending data by ftp and Email and to join the distributed pull network. Fifteen countries changed their system already and started participating to the distributed network.

2) The creation of a second central node (BfS) that contains a copy of the monitoring data of all countries that participate to the distributed pull-network. In 2006 the DG TREN (Transport and Energy) will become the third central node.

3) The JRC node is the only gateway between data originating from the distributed pull-network and data arriving by ftp or Email. In addition the EURDEP website is running at the JRC premises. Therefore the JRC runs all EURDEP related software on fault-tolerant hardware since January 2004.

4) The incoming data is continuously monitored and warning messages are automatically sent by Email to the data-provider in case of interruptions of the data flow.

5) The capacity of data-providers to make two-hourly or hourly data available during accidents is tested through the participating to international exercises. The obtained

exercise results are steadily improving. During the latest Convex-3 exercise 20 countries successfully switched to one-hourly and two-hourly transmission frequency.

7 Relation to other systems

• The submission of data to the EURDEP network is a legally accepted alternative for sending environmental monitoring data through the ECURIE system.

• The EURDEP data is used by the ENSEMBLE [6] system to improve the modeling predictions.

• The CBSS network [7] operated by the Baltic Sea States uses the EURDEP data-format and the same monitoring stations, so that the two systems practically overlap. The central CBSS node (BfS) is also the mirror-site for the EURDEP data.

• The MODEM [5] (Monitoring Data and information Exchange aMong decision support systems) project is using the EURDEP data-format.

AIRDOS is a study of limited duration that has the scope to make an inventory of the existing monitoring networks, stations and instruments. The results will be loaded in a database and it is foreseen to access this database through the EURDEP web-interface in order to give the user more detailed information about the monitoring stations that send their measurements to the EURDEP network.

8 Experience gained

The EURDEP network effectively operates since 1996 and has grown in these 9 years from weekly data-exchange with six countries using different national data-formats to (mostly) hourly data-exchange in a standard data-format between 28 countries. The application of changes to Platform items (such as the data-format or the transmission protocols) are a lengthy and time-consuming process. This is in part alleviated by the application of an ECURIE-EURDEP working group, which members all represent some 3-4 EURDEP countries. This working group interfaces the ECURIE and EURDEP activities, proposes future

activities, collects ideas and approval from the participating countries and assists in some of the implementation aspects. The variety and large number of participants combined with the limited availability of resources and the need for reliable operation has determined the implementation of simple and robust procedures such as the mirroring concept for data-exchange. The regularity with which data is made available by the data-providers seems reasonably good, although we do not have access to similar systems for appropriate comparison. On the average there is about one data-provider each week that fails to deliver data for one or more days. In this case they are automatically alerted by the EURDEP system, so that in general the (mostly technical) problems are quickly corrected. The participation to international exercises has shown that there are some 25% of the data-providers that – for different reasons - are not able to switch to the hourly emergency mode. Because of the above mentioned experiences we are therefore of the opinion that the entire network should work identical during routine and emergency, in other words, that data should always be made available in an hourly manner so that no particular EURDEP related actions need to be taken by the data-providers when an accident occurs.

8.1 Remaining problems

The major problems for which no solution has yet been found are: • Internet dependency: if large parts of the global Internet

infrastructure would not work during a nuclear accident, part of the monitoring data would not be available.

• The differences in the national monitoring networks make direct comparison difficult i.e. the different representative measuring periods (ranging from 5 minutes to 24 hours) should be further harmonized.

9 Future

The EURDEP network is a “living” and dynamic environment because of the variety of the underlying national networks and Organizations. Sustainable progress and various improvements are therefore foreseen for the coming years:

o Further harmonization of the national monitoring network properties

o Extension of the network to other countries such as Greece, Turkey, Belarus, Ucraine

o Achieve participation of most (or all) countries to the distributed pull-network

o Further extension to the exchange of additional Sample Types and local meteorological data

o Introduction of the EURDEP 3.0 format (XML variant) o Improvement of the EURDEP website o Introduction of statistics and resulting quality indicators for

monitoring stations to show the regularity with which routine measurements are submitted

o Set-up of data and website mirroring at the DG TREN in Luxembourg

o Visualization of monitoring station characteristics contained in the AIRDOS database

o Improvement of the system security (e.g. by using secure-ftp) Conclusion: The major benefits of the EURDEP platform are 1) the establishment of a European de-facto data-format standard for radiological monitoring data and 2) the availability of data from most European monitoring stations in almost real-time. Although the EURDEP system has reached a certain maturity, there is still plenty room for improvement. The first goal is to further extend and improve the functionalities of the system as described in this paper. The second goal is to invoke more awareness amongst the competent authorities that further harmonization of the national monitoring networks will increase the benefits of international data-exchange. In this context we hope that the data and information deriving from the EURDEP network and the AIRDOS study will be useful to demonstrate both the existing differences as well as the trends for harmonization. The mechanisms used to manage EURDEP such as its working group and the international Workshops could aim to accelerate this harmonization between various national monitoring networks. Last but not least, it seems that the availability of large amounts of European monitoring data and a standard data-format is useful for

other projects regarding radiological emergency response such as ECURIE, ENSEMBLE, CBSS, MODEM and studies regarding automatic mapping algorithms.

Acknowledgements:

The authors wish to thank Tore Tollefsen for reviewing this paper and giving constructive comments.

References:

[1] Council Decision of 14 December 1987 on Community arrangements for the early exchange of information in the event of a radiological emergency, OJ No L 371/76 30 12 1987.

[2] G. de Vries, M. De Cort, V. Tanner (2005), Harmonization of the IAEA and EU early notification systems. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Monitoring, Assessments and Uncertainties for Nuclear and Radiological Emergency Response, Rio de Janeiro, 21 - 25 November 2005.

[3] G. de Vries, M. De Cort, EURDEP Data Format version 2.0, Reference Manual, S.P.I. __.___

[4] B. de Lange, Fontys Hogeschool Eindhoven, Netherlands (2000), Assessment of data-exchange network-concepts and their application to the EURDEP project.

[5] Rojas Palma et al. (2004), Data And Information Exchange Prototype For Nuclear Emergency Response: Status And Future Perspectives. In: Proceedings of the Symposium on Off-site Nuclear Emergency Management, September 21-24, 2004, Rhodes, Greece.

[6] Galmarini S. et al. (2004), Can the confidence in long range atmospheric transport models be increased? The pan European experience of ENSEMBLE Rad. prot. Dos., Vol. 109, Nos 1-2, pp. 19-24

[7] Council of the Baltic Sea States, Agreement on the Exchange of Radiation Monitoring Data (7 June 2001)