Network Sensitivity to Geographical Con¯guration

Abstract. Gravitational wave astronomy will require the coordinated analysis of data from the global network of gravitational wave observatories. Questions of how to optimally con¯gure the global network naturally arise in this context. We propose a formalism to compare di®erent con¯gurations of the network, using both the coincident network analysis method and the coherent network analysis method, and construct a model to compute a ¯gure-of-merit based on the detection rate for a population of standard-candle binary inspirals. We ¯nd that this measure of network quality is very sensitive to the geographic location of component detectors under a coincident network analysis, but comparatively insensitive under a coherent network analysis