Muon intensity variations and atmospheric temperature

Abstract

Muons in the atmosphere are formed during the decay of pions resulting from nuclear interactions of cosmic rays with nuclei of air atoms. The resulting muons are also unstable particles with a short lifetime. Therefore, not all of them reach the level of observation in the atmosphere. When the atmospheric temperature changes, the distance to the observation level changes too, thus leading to variations in the intensity of muons of temperature origin. These variations, caused by atmospheric temperature variations, are superimposed on continuous observations of muon telescopes. Their exclusion is, therefore, extremely necessary, especially in the data from modern muon telescopes whose statistical accuracy is very high. The contribution of various atmospheric layers to the total temperature effect is not the same for muons. This contribution is characterized by the distribution of the density of temperature coefficients for muons in the atmosphere. Using this distribution and the continuous intensity observations from the muon telescope in Novosibirsk, the inverse problem has been solved, from the solution of which the atmospheric temperature variations over a long period from 2004 to 2011 have been found. The results obtained are compared with aerological sounding data.

Revisiting the Limits of Atmospheric Temperature Retrieval From Cosmic‐Ray Measurements

“…In the light of those very promising results, it is surprising to these authors that such natural extensions were not pursued. In fact, more recent studies have endeavored to obtain the temperature for more atmospheric layers by using a single detector and measurements at different angles (e.g., Yanchukovsky, 2020; Yanchukovsky et al., 2007; Yanchukovsky et al., 2015).…”