The Effect of Tornadic Supercell Thunderstorms on the Atmospheric Muon Flux

Abstract

Tornadoes are severe weather phenomena characterized by a violently rotating column of air connecting the ground to a parent storm. Within the United States, hundreds of tornadoes occur every year. Despite this, the dynamics of tornado formation and propagation are not particularly well understood, in part due to the challenge of instrumentation: many existing instruments for measuring atmospheric properties are in-situ detectors, making deployment in or near an active or developing tornado difficult. Here, we combine local atmospheric and cosmic ray air shower simulation to explore the potential for remote measurement of the pressure field within tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms by examining directional variations of the atmospheric muon flux.

arXiv commentAccepted to PRD

References in corpus (5)

• The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory
• Spectrum of cosmic-ray nucleons and the atmospheric muon charge ratio
• A simple model for predicting the hurricane radius of maximum wind from outer size
• Monitoring temporal opacity fluctuations of large structures with muon tomography : a calibration experiment using a water tower tank
• Observation of Variations in Cosmic Ray Single Count Rates During Thunderstorms and Implications for Large-Scale Electric Field Changes

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Using Cosmic Rays to Predict the Weather: Meteorological Data Assimilation of Atmospheric Muon Flux Data