Originally Posted by
giggitygiggity
I'm not sure how the radiation calculator calculates the figure, but maybe in some cases it's worth investigating further. Perhaps you could buy a commercial dosimeter?
FWIW I used the CARI program many years back to track my exposure - since (as IanW mentioned) the level of Galactic cosmic radiation reaching the upper atmosphere depends upon the Sun''s level of activity (cf. Solar wind) CARI used to use an observed variable called the heliocentric potential (for which you had go online to the likes of NOAA) in it’s algorithms to in part calculate your exposure...that variable at the time was available for I think monthly Intervals. It is possible later versions of CARI will pick that value up automatically once it knows your flight date but I haven't looked at it for a while. Also CARI needs your route and very importantly your flight’s vertical profile. Fundamentally if you want to track your own exposure accurately, rather than come up with generic figures, you need to do a bespoke calculation for your flights, which involves quite a bit of book keeping for every sector regarding date, level changes and route taken and other stuff in order to produce anything really meaningful - simply entering AAA to BBB and a mean flight level can lead to considerable errors.
I did all this this for a year on longhaul and it worked out generally at very roughly 40 micro (uSv) on a Europe -Midwest USA sector and less on other routes.
As for easily avaliable commercial personal dosometers - my contacts tell me there''s nothing really easilly available to the individual as a single device that will cover the full "spectrum" of radiation we are exposed to with adequate sensitivity across the range of radiation types...but I know some disagree.
(Edit to add: For info found my records. Year was 2000, so around a Solar Maximum, aircraft 744 so assume start cruise low with FL’s low 300s end up high FL 300s
typical approximate doses calculated by CARI :
Typical highest “dose” sector Europe -Japan, 50ish uSv
Europe-West Coast States high 40 uSv
Europe-eastern Seaboard 30 uSv
Europe -Central Africa 20 uSv
Europe -South America 30 uSv