Speaker
Description
Atmospheric conditions affect the development of secondary particles produced by primary cosmic rays. In this work, we present a methodology to simulate the impact of the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) atmospheric models in secondary particle flux at the Earth's surface. GDAS implements global atmospheric models based on meteorological measurements and numerical weather predictions. GDAS gives latitude-longitude-altitude dependent profiles of the atmosphere's main state variables like temperature, pressure, and humidity.
To validate our methodology, we built monthly GDAS atmospheric profiles over Malargüe-Argentina between 2006 and 2011. The verification analysis consisted of comparing the maximum atmospheric depth (Xmax) with those calculated with the Auger atmospheric option used in CORSIKA simulations. The difference between the GDAS-based and the Auger standard atmospheric Xmax lags behind 2%.
The methodology was implemented for the city of Bucaramanga-Colombia, using ARTI for the year 2018. ARTI is a full computational framework, developed by the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) Collaboration, to estimate the particle spectra on Water Cherenkov Detectors depending on the geographical coordinates. We observed that the most significant total flux differences, from the predefined atmospheric profile (subtropical) and GDAS-based, occur in November (~10.22%) and April (~24.12%). An inverse correlation also results between the particle flux and the monthly average temperature. Similarly, for muons on these dates, the difference is between 9.58% and 22.25% respectively. These results confirm the significance of the atmospheric variation in the flux of secondary particles measured at ground level during the year.
Keywords
Astroparticle flux, Atmospheric models, Extensive air showers
| Subcategory | Theoretical Results |
|---|---|
| other Collaboration | LAGO |
