Conversion coefficients for cosmic radiation in the atmosphere

The main purpose of the present calculations was the evaluation of the fluence-to-effective dose conversion coefficients for cosmic radiation in the atmosphere. During their work air crew members are exposed to elevated ionising radiation from cosmic radiation which shall be determined. Cosmic radiation in the Earth's atmosphere exhibits a complex environment consisting of neutrons, protons, photons, electrons, positrons, pions, muons and heavy ions. Their energy range extends up to hundreds of GeV. To calculate the dose components from the particle fluences in the atmosphere, the effective dose conversion coefficients of all particle types produced by the galactic cosmic rays have to be determined. In the high energy range (approximately above 10 MeV) there is only a limited number of data available in the literature. Only INFN (Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) in Italy has published a consistent set of fluence-to-effective dose conversion coefficients for all kinds of radiation and incident energies up to 10 TeV, calculated by the FLUKA transport code. The aim of this work is to validate these earlier calculations performed by FLUKA using the high energy code MCNPX and fill in the gaps in the conversion coefficients as a function of particle energy