The original title: "Forecast for Plume's Path Is a Function of Wind and Weather" is much more accurate. The story explicitly says that this is a model for a co

The original title: "Forecast for Plume's Path Is a Function of Wind and Weather" is much more accurate. The story explicitly says that this is a model for a continuous source (which the current accident is far from being). It doesn't mean to predict radiation levels, but simply to provide information about where and how radiation releases will spread given the wind and weather pattern, and what relative intensities would look like. This information is very useful if you have a monitoring station and want to estimate an overall picture of the disaster given the readings on your equipment. Enough such readings would give a valuable triangulation to the news coming straight from Fukushima.