The cosmic ray anisotropy below 10¹⁵ eV

Abstract. The measurement of the anisotropy in the cosmic ray (CR) arrival direction distribution provides important informations on the propagation mechanisms and on the identification of their sources. In the last decade the anisotropy came back to the attention of the scientific community, thanks to several new two-dimensional representations of the CR arrival direction distribution which clearly showed the existence of anisotropies at different angular scales in both hemispheres. The origin of the observed anisotropies is still unknown. So far, no theory of CRs in the Galaxy exists yet to explain the observations leaving the standard model of CRs and that of the local magnetic field unchanged at the same time. In this paper the observations of Galactic CR anisotropy will be briefly summarized, with particular attention to the results obtained by the ARGO-YBJ experiment in the Northern Hemisphere.