Assessment of indoor radon levels at multiple floors of an apartment building in the historic center of Rome (Italy): a comprehensive study.

The urbanized area of Rome is largely built over volcanic deposits, characterized by a significant radionuclides content and consequently a high radon emanation potential. An accurate monitoring of workplaces and residential dwellings constitutes a first step towards mitigating the indoor radon exposure. Since radon diffusion dynamics involves complex interactions among many environmental parameters on different time scales, a proper assessment of radon concentration variations can be better achieved by means of active monitoring approaches.

Active Monitoring of Residential Radon in Rome: A Pilot Study.

We present an overview of the potential of active monitoring techniques to investigate the many factors affecting the concentration of radon in houses. We conducted two experiments measuring radon concentration in 25 apartments in Rome and suburban areas for two weeks and in three apartments in the historic center for several months. The reference levels of 300 and 100 Bq/m are overcome in 17% and 60% of the cases, respectively, and these percentages rise to 20% and 76% for average overnight radon (more relevant for residents' exposure).

Multi-level continuous monitoring of indoor radon activity.

We present the results of an experiment taking place inside the geophysical museum of Rocca di Papa (Rome, Italy), where the high radon levels detected might pose a risk to the health of workers and of the public audience. As a first step towards the mitigation of potential exposure risk, four active sensors were installed at different floors of the building, in order to continuously monitor not only radon exhalation from the soil but also its transport from the ground up to elevated floors. Collecting more than three years of data of radon concentration enables us to identify fluctuations over both short and seasonal scales and to elucidate the relation between radon variations and changes of internal temperature and relative humidity.

Monitoring soil radon during the 2016-2017 central Italy sequence in light of seismicity.

The radioactive nature of radon makes it a powerful tracer for fluid movements in the crust, and a potentially effective marker to study processes connected with earthquakes preparatory phase. To explore the feasibility of using soil radon variations as earthquakes precursor, we analyse the radon concentration data recorded by two stations located close to the epicentre of the strongest mainshock (Mw 6.5 on October 30, 2016) of the seismic sequence which affected central Italy from August 2016.

Implementing soil radon detectors for long term continuous monitoring.

The employment of different instruments for radon continuous measurements within the Italian Radon mOnitoring Network (IRON), mostly INGV, Algade AER and Airthings Corentium instruments, requires a uniform characterization and calibration protocol for the results to be comparable in a rigorous way. A 56 L stainless steel radon chamber with a sensitivity of 0.95 ± 0.

Multiple seasonality in soil radon time series.

The dynamics governing the movement of the radon are complex and dependent on many factors. In the present study, we characterise the nature of temporal variations of 2-hourly and daily radon measurements in several monitoring sites of the Italian Radon mOnitoring Network (IRON) in Italy. By means of continuous wavelet transformation, a spectral analysis in time-frequency domain is performed.