The European Tracer Experiment Description and Summary of the ETEX Project

The European Tracer Experiment (ETEX) is jointly organised by the European Commission, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Meteorological Organization. The project was established to evaluate the validity of long-range transport models for real time application in emergency management and to assemble a database which will allow the evaluation of long-range atmospheric dispersion models in general (Klug et al., 1993) ETEX main objectives were to conduct a European-scale tracer experiment, and test the capability of meteorological institutes responsible for emergency response to forecast in real time atmospheric dispersion (Girardi et al., 1997). Following this, the Atmospheric Transport Model Evaluation Study II (ATMES II) will simulate the tracer experiment with the same meteorological input data for all models.