ASWFC receives cosmic ray (neutron monitor) data from Kingston and Mawson every 5 minutes. Each file contains five 1-minute records.

Kingston is a township and region on the outskirts of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. It is home to the headquarters of the Australian Antarctic Division.

Mawson is situated on an isolated outcrop of rock on the coast in Mac.Robertson Land, at the edge of the Antarctic plateau. It is Australia's first continental station and the longest continuously operating station south of the Antarctic Circle.

Data Record Format

Cosmic Ray Data Format is the same for both stations. Each line contains the following space-separated fields:

• year
• day of year
• UTC start hour
• UTC start minute
• count corrected for pressure
• count uncorrected for pressure
• pressure used for correction

Examples

Filename: KIN20040617.SSE (Kingston, 2004, Day 169, 17 June 2004)

Filename: MAW20040617.SSE (Mawson, 2004, Day 169, 17 June 2004)

After 14th February 2020, a bare neutron monitor was installed at Mawson station. A bare neutron monitor differs from a standard neutron monitor by not having any lead moderator or plastic outer reflector surrounding the counters. This gives the bare monitor a different spectral response to the incoming cosmic rays allowing investigation of spectral differences in transient cosmic ray phenomena. The new SSE data file includes three more columns. They are the corrected and uncorrected bare count rates, in that order (the same as the normal ones) and minute interval end. All the data in the SSE files are total counts for the minute from all detectors of the particular type. So the units are counts per minute. So the data are formatted as follows:

Year, day of year (DoY), hour, minute, NM corrected counts, NM uncorrected counts, Correction pressure, Bare NM corrected counts, Bare NM uncorrected counts, minute interval end

All counts are in units of counts per minute and the pressure is in mm Hg. The correction is done using the pressure to correct for absorption by the mass of atmosphere above the detector.

Filename: MAW_20200214.SSE (Mawson, 2020, Day 045, 14 February 2020)