Publication: Quality Control of Surface Wind Observations in Northeastern North America. Part I: Data Management Issues
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2018-01
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Amer meteorological soc
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Abstract
A quality control (QC) process has been developed and implemented on an observational database of surface wind speed and direction in northeastern North America. The database combines data from 526 land stations and buoys spread across eastern Canada and five adjacent northeastern U.S. states. It combines the observations of three different institutions spanning from 1953 to 2010. The quality of these initial data varies among source institutions. The current QC process is divided into two parts. Part I, described herein, is focused on issues related to data management: issues stemming from data transcription and collection; differences in measurement units and recording times; detection of sequences of duplicated data; unification of calm and true north criteria for wind direction; and detection of physically unrealistic data measurements. As a result, around similar to 0.1% of wind speed and wind direction records have been identified as erroneous and deleted. The most widespread error type is related to duplications within the same station, but the error type that entails more erroneous data belongs to duplications among different sites. Additionally, the process of data compilation and standardization has had an impact on more than 90% of the records. A companion paper (Part II) deals with a group of errors that are conceptually different, and is focused on detecting measurement errors that relate to temporal consistency and biases in wind speed and direction.
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© 2018 American Meteorological Society. EELE was supported by the Agreement of Cooperation 4164281 between the UCM and St. Francis Xavier University, and projects CGL2014-59644-R and PCIN-2014-017-C07-06 of the MINECO (Spain). Funding for 4164281 was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC DG 140576948), the Canada Research Chairs Program (CRC 230687), and the Atlantic Innovation Fund (AIF-ACOA). HB holds a Canada Research Chair in Climate Dynamics. JN and JFGR were supported by projects PCIN-2014-017-C07-03, PCIN-2014-017-C07-06, CGL2011-29677-C02-01 and CGL2011-29677-C02-02 of the MINECO (Spain). This research has been conducted under the Joint Research Unit between UCM and CIEMAT, by the Colaboration Agreement 7158/2016. We wish to thank the people of Environment and Climate Change Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and National Center for Atmospheric Research for providing us with the original data used in this study and for their kindness in responding to all the questions that arose during the development of this work and the review process. Special thanks to Gerard Morin and Hui Wan for the metadata from the EC sites; Bruce Bradshaw, Mathieu Ouellet and Bridget Thomas for information regarding moored buoys; and Douglas Schuster for information regarding the ds461.0 and ds464.0 datasets. We thank J. Alvarez Solas, A. Hidalgo, and P. A. Jiménez for the helpful discussions. Finally, we would also like to thank the reviewers for the many suggestions and useful information they offered us.