Muon tomography for melting glaciers monitoring

This thesis presents the development of an innovative detector for muography, aimed at monitoring glacier melting. The process of glacier melting is not completely understood and is considered a crucial parameter in view of the global warming. Muography is a widely used technique, that takes advantages of the muon flux reaching Earth surface, employed to perform imaging of the inner structure of large objects, as volcanoes, container, and pyramids. The goal of our project is the development of a detector able to measure the glacier thickness with short exposure time, and with a real time data taking and processing, to perform studies of the seasonal behavior and the glacier melting trend through the years. Thanks to optimization studies through simulations, the developed detector has an angular resolution better than 5 mrad which results in an accuracy of less than 5 meters in the measurement of ice thickness, and a good reconstruction uniformity within the entire field of view. The read-out chain, based on FERS boards A5202, was fully tested and characterized, to ensure precision in measuring and analyzing muon flux. The development of a prototype confirmed the feasibility of the proposed design and validated the developed simulation. Preliminary tests shows good agreement between real data and simulated data.