One of the primary goals of the ARM Program is to provide data streams of reasonable quality for scientific research. Traditionally, data quality issues have been addressed within ARM by several groups, including instrument mentors, site scientists, value-added product scientists, and Science Team members at large. Maintaining data quality for a program with the size and complexity of ARM is a significant challenge.

The ARM Data Quality Office (DQO) was established in July 2000 to help coordinate data quality efforts within ARM. The DQO is responsible for ensuring that quality assurance results are communicated to data users as well as ARM Operations and Engineering Groups to facilitate improved instrument performance. To address these responsibilities, the DQO developed a Data Quality Processing Algorithm (DQPA) that automatically performs range checks as well as other user-defined checks on the data. The results of these checks are displayed in tables, which are available on a series of web pages (http://dq.arm.gov). These tables have options to view static plots or create plots using an interactive plotting tool called NCVWEB (NCVweb: An Interactive Web-Based Tool for Viewing ARM Data, Moore and Bottone, 19th International IIPS Conference). Instrument mentors, site scientists, and DQO personnel use these tools to assess data quality on a daily and weekly basis. The next generation of data browsing and quality reporting tools is currently under development.