The assessment of local geological factors for the construction of a Geogenic Radon Potential map using regression kriging. A case study from the Euganean Hills volcanic district (Italy)

The assessment of potential radon-hazardous environments is nowadays a critical issue in planning, monitoring, and developing appropriate mitigation strategies. Although some geological structures (e.g., fault systems) and other geological factors (e.g., radionuclide content, soil organic or rock weathering) can locally affect the radon occurrence, at the basis of a good implementation of radon-safe systems, optimized modelling at territorial scale is required. The use of spatial regressionmodels, adequately combining different types of predictors, represents an invaluable tool to identify the relationships between radon and its controlling factors as well as to construct Geogenic Radon Potential (GRP) maps of an area. In thiswork, two GRP maps were developed based on fieldmeasurements of soil gas radon and thoron concentrations and gamma spectrometry of soil and rock samples of the Euganean Hills (northern Italy) district. A predictivemodel of radon concentration in soil gaswas reconstructed taking into account the relationships among the soil gas radon and seven predictors: terrestrial gamma dose radiation (TGDR), thoron (220Rn), fault density (FD), soil permeability (PERM), digital terrain model (SLOPE), moisture index (TMI), heat load index (HLI). These predictors allowed to elaborate local spatial models by using the Empirical Bayesian Regression Kriging (EBRK) in order to find the best combination and define the GRP of the Euganean Hills area.

COLETTI Chiara;  CIOTOLI Giancarlo;  BENÀ Eleonora;  BRATTICH Erika;  CINELLI Giorgia;  GALGARO Antonio;  MASSIRONI Matteo;  MAZZOLI Claudio;  MOSTACCI Domiziano;  MOROZZI Pietro;  MOZZI Paolo;  NAVA Jacopo;  RUGGIERO Livio;  SCIARRA Alessandra;  TOSITTI Laura;  SASSI R.; 

2022-04-07

ELSEVIER

JRC127370

0048-9697 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721071400,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC127370,   

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152064 (online),