ARGOS DSS
ARGOS is a Decision Support System (DSS) for crisis and emergency management for incidents with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) releases.
The ARGOS Consortium
The current member countries of the ARGOS Consortium are (March 2010): Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Ireland, Lithuania, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Poland and Sweden.
The users of ARGOS are national organizations responsible for emergency management. These users have established the ARGOS Consortium with the objective of maintaining and further evolve ARGOS as a state-of-the-art decision support system for emergency response, as well as a network of expertise.
Organizations from a country can get license-free access to all software in the ARGOS suite, but the country must first become a member of the ARGOS Consortium. Membership of the ARGOS Consortium includes an annual membership fee which is used for the future development and maintenance of ARGOS. The membership fees are set relative to a country's GDP, so that countries with a larger GDP pays more than one with a smaller GDP.
The Consortium arranges an annual meeting where all members have equal opportunities to influence the development of the system. The Consortium discusses experiences with ARGOS and decides which new facilities to develop, which new models to include, among others.
The ARGOS system
In case of incidents with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear releases, ARGOS can be used to get an overview of the situation, create a prognosis of how the situation will evolve, and calculate the consequences of the incidents. The target is accidents, as well as terrorist initiated events related to CBRN industries, transports of hazardous materials, and others.
ARGOS improves situation awareness, facilitates decision support, and information sharing among the emergency response organizations. As a simulation instrument, ARGOS is also valuable for training of response organizations, and for providing information to the public.
The ARGOS system makes intensive use of geographic information system (GIS) to display data on geographic maps. Colours are used to express the concentration, contamination, time-of-arrival, trajectories, doses or inhalation, and ISO curves can display important threshold levels. The GIS system can display NPP’s – measuring stations and weather conditions like precipitation and wind fields.
For running short range prognoses, ARGOS can download a numerical weather prediction from the Met-Office in the country. As the main atmospheric dispersion model, ARGOS includes the RIMPUFF model from Risø National Laboratory.
ARGOS history
The original development of ARGOS started in 1992 by the Danish Emergency Management Agency and Prolog Development Center,[1] in close cooperation with Risø National Laboratory and the Danish Meteorological Institute.
The ARGOS Consortium was founded in 2001 by the Danish Emergency Management Agency, Ireland, Norway and PDC.