Wednesday, 16 January 2002
Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Data Quality Inspection and Assessment Activities: A Streamlined Approach
A primary task of the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) Site Scientist Team (SST) is to inspect and assess the quality of SGP data streams. Cooperation between the SGP SST, ARM Data Quality Office (DQO), ARM Instrument Team (IT), and ARM Value-Added Product developers has led to the creation of new tools for assessing data quality, reporting problems and for issuing data quality reports to ARM data users. The ARM SGP Data Quality Health and Status web site displays information near real-time and is the operational data quality assessment tool. The Data Quality Health and Status website contains daily and hourly quality information along with diagnostic plots for each instrument. This information is used to analyze and document ARM SGP data quality. The first step in documenting data quality is the Data Quality Assessment Report (DQAR), which is a weekly summary of instrument performance. The next step in documenting data quality is to report instrument-related problems to ARM SGP Site Operations by submitting a Data Quality Problem Report (DQPR). The SST and Site Operations developed the DQPR database to alert Site Operations of problems and track corrective maintenance. The final step in documenting data quality is the Data Quality Report (DQR). DQRs are written statements about quality of data for a specific time period and are attached to data ordered from the ARM Archive. Work is now in progress to develop similar health and status tools for ARM's Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) and North Slope of Alaska (NSA) data gathering locations.
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