1. HISparc
By Simon Drugan

2. Project
My project was to see the correlation between the Average Atmospheric pressure and the average number of events in a day.
I chose this because I thought it would be interesting to find out how cosmic rays behave when travelling through air, and how different levels of atmospheric pressure would effect this.

3. Result gathering
I got my results from looking at the event histogram from our school, Bristol Grammar School, on the HiSPARC website during the first months of 2014, combined with the weather data from Martyn Hicks’s website.

4. January 2014
In the first month of data I collected I found that there was very strong linear correlation, showing that when the Average Daily Atmospheric pressure increased, the number of coincidences decreased.

5. February 2014
The data I collected in the second month I collected I found that there was a very linear correlation when the atmospheric pressure was lower. At higher levels of Average Atmospheric pressure, however, there is less correlation. This may be due to anomalous results and/or lack of results.

6. Reasons Why
These results probably came about because when there is larger amounts of atmospheric pressure, there a higher volume of air in the way of the cosmic rays. As they pass through the air they lose energy is 'lost'. This means that there is fewer, in total, cosmic rays and they will have less energy.

7. Predictions coming in
When I went into this investigation I predicted that the higher the atmospheric pressure, the fewer number of coincidences would be recorded. This turned out to be correct, as can be seen from this graph:

8. Looking back
If I repeated this again, I would add more data and do breakdowns of different months, to see if temperature in different seasons changed anything. Also, I would try to se if especially high values atmospheric pressure would keep the same correlation, the same with very low values. I would do the same thing with days that averages the highest and lowest values of total coincidences, and seen if this was attributed to that Atmospheric pressure that day, or something else.

9. Thanks for listening!