Quality control of environmental measurement data with quality flagging

Abstract

We discuss quality control of environmental measurement data. Typically, environmental data is used to compute some specific indicators based on models, historical data, and the most recent measurement data. For such a computation to produce reliable results, the data must be of sufficient quality. The reality is, however, that environmental measurement data has a huge variation in quality. Therefore, we study the use of quality flagging as a means to perform both real-time and off-line quality control of environmental measurement data. We propose the adoption of the quality flagging scheme introduced by the Nordic meteorological institutes. As the main contribution, we present both a uniform interpretation for the quality flag values and a scalable Enterprise Service Bus based architecture for implementing the quality flagging. We exemplify the use of the quality flagging and the architecture with a case study for monitoring of built environment.