The Oklahoma Mesonet is an automated network of 115 remote, meteorological stations across Oklahoma. Each station measures core parameters that include: air temperature and relative humidity at 1.5 m, wind speed and direction at 10 m, atmospheric pressure, incoming solar radiation, rainfall, and bare and vegetated soil temperatures at 10 cm below ground level. In addition, 101 sites measure soil moisture at 4 depths: 5, 25, 60, and 75 cm. The Mesonet was installed during 1993 and became operational on 1 January 1994. In 1999, ten Oklahoma Mesonet sites were augmented with a suite of instruments capable of measuring surface heat fluxes and the downwelling and upwelling components of solar and terrestrial radiation normal to the earth’s surface. These ten sites were a part of the Oklahoma Atmospheric Surface-layer Instrumentation System Project, and they are known as the OASIS Super Sites.

Observations of radiation and surface fluxes at the OASIS Super Sites have been archived since 1 June1999. However, an automated quality assurance (QA) methodology has not been developed. Because the data is reported every 5 minutes on a spatial scale covering most of Oklahoma, a wealth of research in land-atmosphere interactions remains virtually untapped. A first attempt to QA OASIS Super Site data involved subjective inspection of data from the Norman (NORM) site. Although the subjective method created a high-quality dataset, the methodology was very inefficient. Because the timely accessibility of research quality datasets is very important to the research community, it was necessary to investigate new QA methodologies. Thus, a second approach involved the development of specific range tests for the radiation and surface heat flux data. As such, QA flags were assigned to each data value. This study highlights the automated QA system under development for downwelling shortwave radiation, downwelling longwave radiation, upwelling shortwave radiation, upwelling longwave radiation, sensible heat flux, latent heat flux, and ground heat flux at the ten OASIS Super Sites.