AJAX全局阵列存储

长话短说，我试图将返回AJAX的JSON中的相应数据值存储到这些全局数组中。我知道数组的构造是正确的，因为我已经在AJAX中放置了警报，但当我将其放置在AJAX之外时，数组仍然是未定义的。

我如何导出整个popData JSON对象来处理它并将值存储在全局数组中，或者在AJAX中填充数组以在调用之外执行？我需要这些数组能够被另一个函数访问，以将填充值与用户选择的一小范围的值进行比较——如果有人想建议一种更好的方法，但它必须在HTML中已经完成的加载上提取填充值。我认为这是在服务器上用最少的AJAX调用实现这一点的最简化的方法，但我愿意接受建议！：D

    var popProducers = new Array();
    var popProducersCount = new Array();

    function getPopulationInfo(){
        $.ajax({
            url:phpURL,
            cache:false,
            dataType:"json",
            data: { },
            success:function(popData){
                for (i=0;i<popData.length;i++){
                    //producers and producersCount should be the same length at all times!
                    //If current producer name isn't in array already
                    if(popProducers.indexOf(popData[i].ProducerName) == -1){
                        //add new element to represent new producer quantity (producerCount.length returns number of elements in the array, thus if there are no elements = 0 thus making index 0 equal to 1 and so on)
                        popProducersCount[popProducersCount.length] = 1;
                        //Adds the producer name to the list of producers
                        popProducers[popProducers.length] = popData[i].ProducerName;
                    } else {
                        //Otherwise, it will increment the index of the producersCount array corresponding with the pre-existing producer name's index by 1
                        popProducersCount[popProducers.indexOf(popData[i].ProducerName)] += 1;
                    }

                }
            }
        });
        alert("Population Data Alert: " + popProducers);