Harmonization of Ambient Dose Rate Monitoring Provides for Large Scale Estimates of Radon Flux Density and Soil Moisture Changes

About 3600 stations in Europe monitor ambient dose rate for radiation protection purpose. In the absence of a nuclear emergency, natural background radiation is recorded. Variations in background radiation are largely driven by spatial differences in the concentration of natural radionuclides in soil and by temporal changes in soil moisture, which shields a varying proportion of the terrestrial component in ambient dose rate. Hence, ambient dose rate data contain information about variations in space and time of other important environmental parameters. This information can be extracted when data from the diverse European networks is harmonized. (author)