Data Provenance and Making Meteorological Measurements: Understanding The Origins of Our Data

Using bad data for critical operations, forecasts, and weather modeling is often worse than having no data. In this presentation I intend to present the concept of data provenance and highlight the knowledge gap of how measurements are made which directly relates to the quality of data. Anecdotally, I have found that unless an instrumentation course is part of a core curriculum, students performing research lack a basic understanding of where their data originates. Those students often take the quality of that data source for granted which can introduce compounding errors into derivations, computations, and other data products. Hands-on equipment instruction is vital for graduates intending to work in the private and public sector for instrumentation. Because it directly impacts all meteorologists’ daily work, comprehensive measurement coursework should be required for all graduates entering the workforce.