Early Roots of Quality Assurance for Meteorological Measurements for Environmental Applications

While now a required element of any planned environmental monitoring network, quality assurance (QA) for meteorological measurements has not always been a priority. Guidance for the routine synoptic measurements was developed by the World Meteorological Organization instruments and measurements experts, and by National Weather Service within the United States. But the sensitivity and legal defensibility of meteorological measurements required additional methodologies to support regulatory air pollution monitoring activities. A small cadre of meteorological measurement experts from equipment manufacturers, consultants, and government developed voluntary consensus standards on characterizing and utilizing meteorological equipment with the required operational characteristics for dispersion modeling applications.

However guidance on the QA aspects of measurement programs was sorely lacking. In 1983, Mr. Thomas J. Lockhart, CCM, CMet, and some of the small cadre of experts from the consensus standards team developed the original Volume IV of the EPA Quality Assurance Handbook for Air Pollution Measurements. Refinements based on the evolution of measurement and data recording systems followed. The EPA Meteorological Monitoring guidance was subsequently published to update the information for the commercial and Department of Energy nuclear energy sectors.

Successful implementation of Volume IV guidelines was largely due to the efforts of Mr. Lockhart, who was the lead author of the 1989 revision to Volume IV. Beginning in 1989, Mr. Lockhart operated a traveling workshop which he developed to educate network operators in QA/QC principals for meteorological measurements. The workshop topics include the sensor operational principals, siting, problem recognition, quality control of measurements, quality assurance of operations, data validation and audit methods. Beginning in late 1993, he was joined by Mr. Robert Baxter, presented a session on upper air meteorological measurements, concurrent with an updated version of Volume IV which was finalized in 1995.

We are presenting a brief history of the development of QA for meteorological measurements through the present times, with comments on the future of this critical element of environmental monitoring programs. This historical perspective will provide a knowledge background for the current and future application of QA methodology to the new class of instrumentation that has been and