Study of Attenuation of Extensive Air Showers

The understanding of the attenuation of the air showers on their passage through different amounts of atmospheric matter is crucial for the reconstruction of their energy. Using established techniques like the constant-intensity-cut method it is possible to estimate this attenuation function from the gathered data itself. Another approach is the use of Monte-Carlo simulations to estimate the attenuation. The different methods imply different systematic uncertainties: The MC based attenuation suffers from the differences between, and uncertainties of, the used hadronic interaction models, but can naturally incorporate a potential energy dependence of the attenuation functions. Whereas the data-driven method does not depend on any hadronic interaction model, it suffers from a low statistics when an estimation of the energy dependence is desired. This contribution highlights the properties of different methods and with the help of extensive Monte-Carlo studies reviews systematic uncertainties of these methods.