User instructions for the DESCARTES environmental accumulation code. Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project

The purpose of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction (HEDR) Project is to estimate the radiation dose that individuals could have received as a result of emissions since 1944 from the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. The HEDR Project work is conducted under several technical and administrative tasks, among which is the Environmental Pathways and Dose Estimates task. The staff on this task have developed a suite of computer codes which are used to estimate doses to individuals in the public. This document contains the user instructions for the DESCARTES (Dynamic estimates of concentrations and Accumulated Radionuclides in Terrestrial Environments) suite of codes. In addition to the DESCARTES code, this includes two air data preprocessors, a database postprocessor, and several utility routines that are used to format input data needed for DESCARTES.