© Author(s) 2007. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Predicting terrestrial 222Rn flux using gamma dose rate as a proxy∗

Abstract. 222Rn is commonly used as a natural tracer for validating climate models. To improve such models a bet-ter source term for 222Rn than currently used is necessary. The aim of this work is to establish a method for mapping this source term by using a commonly measured proxy, the gamma dose rate (GDR). Automatic monitoring of GDR has been networked in 25 European countries by the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the Joint Research Cen-tre (JRC IES) in Ispra, Italy, using a common data format. We carried out simultaneous measurements of 222Rn flux an