A data base approach to analysis of meteor burst data

This paper describes an approach to the analysis of data from the U.S. Air Force high latitude meteor burst test bed in which a data base of key statistics is created from the raw data records. The data base approach reduces the storage, processing and analysis requirements while preserving the flexibility of analysis inherent in using raw data and can be used to analyze the propagation and communication properties of the high latitude meteor channel as a function of operating frequency, time of day, day, month, and propagation mechanism. Expert system techniques are incorporated in the software to automate various elements of the analysis procedure allowing a massive amount of data to be processed in a time‐ and cost‐efficient fashion. Examples of output from the data base are presented to show the power of the technique.