Area dose rate values derived from NaI or LaBr3 spectra.

More and more spectrometric systems are being installed in environmental radiation monitoring stations instead of or in addition to dosimetric detectors, because novel spectrometric systems have been developed which do not need any cooling and because the necessary electronics, especially digital multichannel analysers, have become more manageable and more affordable. The advantage of obtaining information about nuclide vectors can justify the operation of a more complex spectroscopic measuring system, but if spectrometers are also used for dose rate measurements in the natural environment, ambient dose equivalent rate values have to be calculated from measured spectra. Different approaches to achieve this goal will be presented in this article. Some practical recommendations will also be presented to avoid known errors.