Response of the muon hodoscope URAGAN to the thunderstorm events occurred in the Moscow region

The flux of muons generated in the atmosphere is sensitive to changes of its basic thermodynamic parameters along the particle trajectory. This dependence is used for the muon diagnostics of the atmosphere. It can be used to trace the dynamics of such events as thunderstorms. In this work the search of thunderstorm-caused disturbances of the muon flux registered by the muon hodoscope URAGAN was conducted by an automatic method of finding of the significant deviations of the current values of the muon counting rate ($I_\text{sum}$) and local anisotropy parameters ($r_\text{south}$, $r_\text{east}$, $r_\text{z}$) from their moving average. The dates selected by this way were compared with the thunderstorm observation dates from the data of three independent meteorological stations ``Domodedovo'', ``VDNKh'' and ``Balchug'' as well as with the data of the meteorological station located in the Experimental Complex NEVOD. The analysis of the obtained data showed that the characteristic events for a thunderstorm are single deviations in the considered parameters, which usually occur several times during a thunderstorm. Also, during a thunderstorm, periodic perturbations with periods in the range from one to five hours are found in the characteristics of the muon flux.