A novel method for atmospheric correction of cosmic-ray data based on principal component analysis

Abstract A new method for atmospheric correction of cosmic ray data is designed. It’s fully empirical, based on the principal component analysis. The method requires knowledge of the pressure and the temperature profile of the atmosphere. It’s applicable to all muon detectors. The method is tested on muon data from two detectors in Belgrade cosmic ray station, one located on the ground level and the other at the depth of 25 mwe. Correction reduces variance by 64.5% in ground level detector data and 38.1% in underground data. At the same time, the amplitude of the annual variation is reduced by 86.0% at ground level and 54.9% underground. With the same data sets the presented method performs better than the integral correction method.