Investigation of Wind’s Effect on LIGO’s Hanford Observatory

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Abstract:: This investigation aims to measure the impact of wind on the search for burst gravitational waves at LIGO’s Hanford detector to determine the potential benefits of a wind mitigation system. The detector’s operational status, glitch rate (Omicron), and accidental events from the main burst search algorithm (Coherent WaveBurst, cWB) were analyzed because these characteristics directly affect LIGO's confidence in a true gravitational wave detection. Based on the effect of wind speed on the omicron trigger (glitch) rate and the cWB accidential trigger population (background), we observe that reducing wind speed will have a modest positive effect on LIGO’s data quality and ability to confidently detect burst gravitational waves.
The overall mean wind speed during observing mode is 2.666 m/s and the overall mean wind speed while not in observing mode is 2.796 m/s; this difference of 0.123 m/s is significant at >99% confidence. The rate of the Omicron triggers increases with the wind speed, with an average Pearson's correlation coefficient of +0.2048. The accidental cWB triggers were separated based on wind speed and their false alarm rate and probabilities calculated. To reach the same false alarm probability, an event must be about +0.2 in strength (r) in order to reach the same significance. A full report of this work is documented in LIGO-T1900412.

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LIGO Document G2201149-v1