Study of cosmic ray diurnal variation on a day-to-day basis

Abstract

From a careful examination of the diurnal variation of cosmic ray intensity at high energies and the interplanetary field characteristics, the average characteristics of diurnal variation were recently explained by us in terms of a balance between outward convection and field aligned diffusion, the latter arising out of a positive radial density gradient. In this paper, we extend this new concept to explain the large variability observed in the diurnal variation on a day-to-day basis and further demonstrate that the measurement of diurnal anisotropy characteristic of cosmic ray particles on a day-to-day basis can be used directly to infer the nature and scale sizes of interplanetary field parameters. Comparing with the magnetic field vector, we show that this simple concept holds good on more than 80% of days. On the rest 20% of days which have a predominant morning maxima, the diurnal anisotropy characteristics seem to indicate the presence of a significant component of transverse diffusion current in addition to the normal convection and diffusion flow. Such days are found to be present in the form of trains of consecutive days and are found to be associated with abrupt changes in the interplanetary field direction having scale sizes >4 hr. The value ofK _⊥/K _‖ which is normally about ⩽0.05 is found to be ≈1.0 on non-field aligned days.