About RADARC311

  The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011, has brought widespread radioactive contamination damage to Fukushima Prefecture and the rest of eastern Japan.

  Immediately after the accident, many organizations and individuals from the government, private sector, universities, and other organizations were actively involved in measuring radiation levels and disseminating this information, which initially clarified the extent of the damage.

  During this time, a vast amount of data on radiation and radioactive materials was recorded, but with the passage of time, some of data is gradually being lost.

  In addition to the importance of the data itself, the situation itself, in which various groups and individuals measured, organized, and disseminated the data to society, is also considered to be a valuable record from the social science points of view.

  Under the situation, the Sub-committee on the Investigation of Environmental Pollution Caused by the Nuclear Accident, Subcommittee on Nuclear Accident Response, General Engineering Committee, Science Council of Japan, the Physical Society of Japan, and the Archives Society of Japan have collaborated to establish the joint-working group for "Radiation and Radioactivity Measurement Data Archives" with the aim of urgently preserving radiation and radioactivity measurement data related to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and archiving them for future generations. We have been announcing to those who have radiation and radioactivity measurement data related to the disaster in their possession to preserve the measurement data, and have been working to collect all kinds of information (metadata) related to the data.

  On the other hand, in the "Interdisciplinary Study on Environmental Transfer of Radionuclides from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP Accident (ISET-R)," an inter-disciplinal scientific research project funded by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI), which was launched as a result of the aforementioned subcommittee, researchers from different fields such as the atmosphere, forests, oceans, and radiation have come together to conduct various measurements and accumulate data for the purpose of understanding the transfer and diffusion of radioactive materials in the environment.

  RADARC311 is a database of metadata on radiation and radioactivity measurements collected through these activities, and allows users to search for availability of data based on the observables of measurement, methods, location, date and time of measurement, and various other information. The metadata format and search system based on the "Inter-university Upper atmosphere Global Observation Network (IUGONET)," has been developed with the support of ISET-R and the search web for the meta-database has been launched.

  Since 2017, the system has been positioned as one of the projects of Center for Integrated Data Science (CIDAS) of Institute for Space-Earth Environment Research. In March 2021, 10 years after the disaster, the metadata search site is officially released to the public. We will continue to collect metadata on radiation and radioactivity measurement data related to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in collaboration with other related activities on database and archival of the disaster.