Analysis of Cosmic Ray Data

Analyzing Ground Array Data

We assume that you will be looking at data with Microsoft Excel for what is described below. To analyze data that is currently being acquired (GPS time stamping only) you will need to learn how to import data into the excel spreadsheet. Bill Leacock has written a guide to import data into the excel spreadsheet. The data contains the time when a shower was detected by a given shower array. After your analysis, you will probably need to do a fit to extract relevant parameters. To do so, use the document Analyzing data with Excel written by Tara Falcone.

Candice Humpherys is working on the following lessons plans (tutorials):

1. Number of events per time interval - This analysis is used to check if your data is truly random (Poisson Distribution), as cosmic ray events should be.
2. Number of Events per hour - To verify if there are day/night differences. (Student's T test)
3. Cosmic ray rate as function of barometric Pressure - This analysis seeks to find a correlation with atmospheric pressure and the number of cosmic ray events detected.

Useful Information

When analyzing ground array data you may want to check if rates have correlation with other parameters such as barometric pressure, Solar Weather, and others. Here's few links that could be intersting for your analysis:

1. Local Weather for ISLIP airport.
2. Local Weather for WestHampton Beach
3. Solar Weather Information from SOHO.
4. Space weather from spaceweather.com
5. Tracking Airplanes http://flightaware.com/