Development of operational near real-time network monitoring and quality control system for implementation at AWS data receiving Earth station

Abstract

The procedures for automatic near real time monitoring of Indian Automatic Weather Station (AWS) network and Quality Control (QC) of data at central data receiving Earth station have been developed and results of test run are presented. In the absence of these procedures, AWS data may meet operational requirements but it would be a result of serendipity. The pervasive influence of erratic values of meteorological parameters received from AWS may cause end users to lose confidence in the system. It therefore behoves network managers to provide data of known and stated quality to end users. The daily reports of network monitoring and system health are generated automatically and sent automatically by email to various maintenance centres and user defined email ids. The QC system sequentially applies range check (gross error, Climatological limit check), step check (maximum and minimum allowable variation during measurement interval) and consistency check (temporal, internal and spatial) on the raw data. The rules for data flagging are also developed as the users of AWS data may legitimately like to know the extent to which QC procedures applied on the data removed the errors. The system has been made operational at INSAT AWS laboratory and it would now be possible to make the data along with metadata and QC flag available to end users. The preliminary results of QC system are encouraging however, performance of algorithms implemented will be continuously monitored and if required, improved algorithms will be incorporated in next version of QC system.