Sensitive study of cosmic ray muon flux variations with Earth's atmosphere, solar activity and geomagnetic disturbances*

Driven by the advancements in particle detection technologies, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in using cosmic rays, particularly muon particles, for many practical applications – ranging from tomography to space and earth weather monitoring. The challenge in space and earth weather monitoring on a global scale using cosmic rays is to deploy many efficient and affordable detectors that can provide accurate correlations between cosmic ray flux variations and the weather conditions.

A low-cost and portable muon particle detector has been developed at Georgia State University.

In this talk, we present the correlation analysis of cosmic muon flux variations with Earth's atmospheric parameters and their sensitivity to the solar activities and geomagnetic disturbances in real-time. The muon flux measurement is from a cosmic ray muon detector which was installed at Mount Wilson Observatory, California, in June 2022. This initial study provides a strong evidence that cosmic muon detection can be used as a potential forecasting tool for the prediction of geomagnetic storms several hours ahead before they hit the Earth. The data from this detector also shows a significant sensitivity to the extreme weather condition in recent days in California from Dec 30, 2022 to Jan 5, 2023.