Analysis of data from the Atmospheric Visibility Monitoring (AVM) program

The Atmospheric Visibility Monitoring (AVM) program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been in place for the last few years to obtain atmospheric transmission statistics data to support free-space optical communications experiments and missions. Atmospheric transmission data is collected through a set of three autonomous systems, all located in the south-western U.S., that observe selected stars throughout the year. Data from these three sites are collected and processed on a regular basis to obtain cumulative distribution functions of atmospheric attenuation for different spectral windows of interest. In This paper, we describe recent work on creation of a database using Microsoft Access to analyze atmospheric transmission data collected by the AVM project. The database, which replaces time-consuming Matlab programs, offers a rapid and extremely easy way to extract and analyze AVM data.