Space weather monitoring with Health Canada’s terrestrial radiation monitoring network

Abstract

This work presents a feasibility study of utilizing Health Canada’s terrestrial radiation monitoring network, the Fixed Point Surveillance (FPS) network, for space weather monitoring through demonstrating detections of Forbush decrease and ground level enhancement events. The network is currently comprised of more than eighty sodium iodide spectrometers distributed across Canada. It was designed for terrestrial radiation monitoring but is also capable of registering cosmic radiation in a high-energy channel. Data from fourteen FPS stations for the period from 2003 to 2018 were analyzed and compared with data obtained by other ground-level cosmic radiation monitoring systems. The level of atmospheric impacts on measurements can be well explained, and signatures of both long-term solar cycle variations and sporadic solar events have been detected in the FPS network. The Forbush decrease amplitudes in FPS were found to be comparable to those obtained in the global muon detector network but about 2–3 times lower than those recorded by the global neutron monitoring network. This study suggests that the 20 years of cosmic ray data from the FPS network can be used for climatological space weather studies. In addition, the network can be readily available for real-time space weather monitoring.