Early in the development of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, the ARM Program Office recognized that procedures must be put in place to facilitate the documentation of problems across the program and their ultimate resolution.
A Problem Review Board (PRB) was created whose mission was to ensure that ARM produces data of known and reasonable quality. The PRB is a small Multi-Laboratory team chaired by the director of the ARM Program Office. The PRB includes the program managers of each of the ARM sites, the heads of the Instrument and Data and Science Integration Team and the Science Applications Group and the PRB manager. The PRB
manager sees that the decisions of the PRB are carried out.
In order to achieve the PRB mission, a procedure was developed to allow anyone to identify problems anywhere along the data ?pipeline?. The PRB meets weekly via conference call to review the status of problems that have been modified via Problem Information Forms (PIFs) and to review reports on data quality, modified as Data Quality Reports (DQRs). The status of an open PIF is reported via ?attachments? to the PIF; when problems reported in PIFs are resolved Corrective Action Reports (CARs) are filed.
Anyone can fill out a PIF to report any problem that impacts the data or the data system delivering the data. DQRs are used when the problem with the data and the solution are fully understood and can be described. Any user receiving an ARM data set should also receive all
DQRs describing that data set. There is work currently underway to automate that process.
PIFs, CARs, DQRs and attachments are maintained in a relational database management system. A suite of Web based tools written in PERL is used to provide forms to enter new PIFs, CARs and DQRs, to browse the contents of the database and to maintain agendas and minutes for the weekly PRB conference calls. There are currently about 1,000 DQRs, 800 PIFs and 600 CARs in the system. While the early emphasis was on problems associated with instruments, recently more attention is given to problems with the generated data streams and work is underway to integrate the ARM Information Architecture. In light of these recent developments, a review of the PIF/CAR/DQR database and associated tools is underway.
This research was performed under the auspices of the United States Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886