Abstract. An approach for measuring the energy of high-energy particles by a thin calorimeter, is presented. The method is based on the universality in the development of cascade processes. For measurements of the primary energy of cosmic ray particles, the correlation analysis of the dependence of the number of secondary particles, N e , at the observation level and the relation of the number of particles, d N , at two levels, divided by an absorber layer, is used. It is shown, that the use of correlation curves (logN e versus d N ) allows to essentially reduce errors in determining the energy of the primary particle, which are connected with the uncertainty in the nature of the primary nucleus and with fluctuations in the development of the cascade process. Uncertainties of energy reconstruction on the basis of the correlation curves methodology, is less than 10 percent.