News

March

DEMA announces ARGOS implementation project in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia

During the summer and autumn of 2010 ARGOS will be installed in the following countries:

• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• The former Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro

February

ARGOS used in the Winter Olympics in Canada

During the 2010 Winter Olympics Health Canada used the new ARGOS Web forecast service.
Health Canada was running more than 30 forecasts every hour on the same machine, which enabled them to cover all the events of the Winter Olympics.

December

New Zealand becomes Member of ARGOS consortium

We are very pleased to announce that New Zealand has joined the ARGOS Consortium from 2010.01.01. A delegation from New Zealand has already met the other Consortium members during the 2008 ARGOS Consortium meeting.

December

United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP15

Copenhagen hosted the 15th UN Climate Change Conference meeting in December 2009. The conference gathered thousands of people from all over the world, including the top leaders of the world. To enhance the security around the meeting, PDC was asked by The Danish Emergency Management Agency (DEMA) to develop and enhance the existing forecast service included the ARGOS suite. Read more.

October

Waste disposal fire in Toelt Denmark

During a large fire in a waste disposal site in the north of Zealand, Denmark, Argos was used to give an overview of the areas affected by smoke from the fire. It was feared that the smoke from the fire had deposited toxic materials like dioxin on the ground. The results from ARGOS were used to determine where to take earth samples for analysis. Read more.

October

NKS-NordDSS Workshop

Nordic workshop for users of Decision Support Systems (DSS), which was held right after the ARGOS consortium meeting, and included most participants from this and well as colleagues from Finland and Germany. The workshop was organized by Jan Erik Dyve from Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority.

The purpose of the workshop was to share national practice and experience on the use of decision support systems such as ARGOS, RODOS and similar systems, during a nuclear crisis and other situations.

The workshop presented various views and discussions of the role or status of the DSS within the organization, and how is it implemented to guarantee that it fulfils this role during a situation. This includes factors such as technical setup and maintenance, and human factors like training and exercises. What types of analysis are performed and how are results used. What is done to assure that the results are interpreted correctly and how the uncertainty is handled. How are the results communicated to the decision-makers, other responders and the public. How do the decision-makers use these results in combination with other information, to decide upon different countermeasures and actions to protect the population. http://www.nks.org/download/nks214_e.pdf

September

9th ARGOS CONSORTIUM Meeting

In September 2009 the annual ARGOS consortium meeting was held at PDC. Delegations from Canada, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, Australia, Brasil, Faroe Islands and developers from the PDC was present at the 3 day meeting.

June

Final EURANOS contractors meeting

This meeting took place in Spain, and was final event in the EURANOS project where ARGOS participated together with the RODOS system. For ARGOS, the main results of the EURANOS project were the integration of the ERMIN and AGRIPCP models for urban and rural countermeasure handling.

November

ARGOS eMapServer now supports OpenStreetMaps

ARGOS eMapServer now supports GIS-maps loaded from http://www.openstreetmap.com/ - a public domain GIS map service. Read more.

November

PDC announces improved database update tool

PDC has completed a project which gives a huge increase in the ease of the ARGOS database update process. ARGOS developer Hans Olav Nymand explains: "It’s both easier and more safe to update the ARGOS databases to new ARGOS versions with this tool".

The database update tool has a user interface that automatically shows and handles which update scripts are necessary to run to update the database. The tool will also give a detailed report, if the database update fails.