QUALITY ASSURANCE OF METEOROLOGICAL DATA

Ensuring data quality is one of the major factors in meteorological measurements. The quality assurance starts at the measurement level by using well characterized and traceable sensors.

The safest approach is to purchase from organizations that are ISO 9000 certified. However, because of the relatively small scale of many meteorological companies, many of them are not certified. In this case references from other users or the literature might be useful to get a certain level of confidence.

All long-term observations should be subject to some sort of regular calibration to ensure that the measurement is stable over time. This is usually done by sending the instruments away to some calibration organization.

A really nice new development is DQMS' s new Data Quality Management Software: software to help you analyze the data, look for improbabilities (sun at night, missing data) and keep trace of all the corrections and calibrations that were made.