STUDY OF THE RESPONSE OF PASTURE VEGETATION TO THE PRESENCE OF Cs-137 IN THE AIR AFTER THE CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT BY USING DECONVOLUTION TECHNIQUES

The Fourier Transform and digital deconvolution techniques have been used to describe the temporal response of a biospheric system to an instantaneous perturbation such as the passage of a contaminated cloud. The method is applied to different sites using the time series of the concentrations of Cesium‐137 in air and vegetation over a period of several weeks. The data used belong to the dataset that was compiled for the BIOMOVS‐A4 international exercise. The impulse response of a theoretical ‘resistance’ model such as the PRYMA model has been obtained using Fourier transform techniques, to obtain a family of functions dependent on a set of theoretical parameters. The experimentally obtained impulse response is then compared with that expected from a mechanistic ‘resistance’ model to study to what extent the results are consistent with the theoretical mechanistic model. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.