Radiation Monitoring...

I have much I want to say about energy production and risk, but I don't have the time to say it all this week. It should be enough to say that the state of Washington and Northern Puget Sound have good reason to talk about BP's disastrous gulf oil spill and Japan's (and GE's) disastrous nuclear calamity and our new/old "War on Libya".

But for today, I am just presenting the statistical data I have gathered monitoring radiation in my office since March 15. Note that since I gather irregular periods, have the monitor located in my network closet, am not a physicist, have multiple layers of HVAC filtration, using a PC based Geiger counter, probably have lots of radon in my basement, etc...


Here are the last eight days of data that average micro-Roentgens/HR on a 30 second Time Based Unit 'TBU') based on a 10 point average. Since the 22nd, it seems like I am seeing a lot of higher spikes in the "background radiation" I am using Aware Electronics RM-80, their 7.9(k) software generated ascii files, and gnuplot in the next two charts.

 

Below compares March 15 with March 22nd for the same averages:

 

Here is all this data "unrolled" by Aware Electronics "DosBox" based 7.9(k) software (no averaged points) and with a polynomial regression trend. You will probably have to download this image and zoom in to see the detail. Note that I collected data 24/7 for the first two days and also mislabeled the 'March 19th' and 'March 18a'. Note also that the collection periods are not uniform.

I present this data without comment and interpretation in the interest of forwarding time sensitive information.  What the data means exactly in relationship to the disaster at Fukushima and radiation received indoors on the West Coast in Bellingham, WA.,  I do not today fully understand.