Using ERA5-Land in RAWS QC and Estimation Process

A project has been underway to perform the first comprehensive quality control (QC) of the national historical Remote Automatic Weather Station (RAWS) network. The current operational network consists of nearly 1900 permanent stations providing hourly fire weather used for operations, historical analyses, and fire danger calculations. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has available The ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5)-Land dataset is available for hourly surface variables at ~9km grid spacing starting in 1950. We use this dataset in statistical algorithms to run a first pass on RAWS data as a QC check. A second component of the project is to gap fill any missing data or values flagged as suspicious with ERA5 output. This presentation will describe the process of the RAWS QC and gap fill and show some basic results. We will also discuss nuisances found in ERA5-land that may be useful for research intending to use the reanalysis dataset.