Gap filling and quality control applied to meteorological variables measured in the northeast region of Brazil

Abstract

In this work, we used the MICE (Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations) technique to impute missing daily data from six meteorological variables (precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and insolation) from 96 stations located in the northeast region of Brazil (NEB) for the period from 1961 to 2014. We then applied tests with a quality control system (QCS) developed for the detection, correction and possible replacement of suspicious data. Both the applied gap filling technique and the QCS showed that it was possible to solve two of the biggest problems found in time series of daily data measured in meteorological stations: the generation of plausible values for each variable of interest, in order to remedy the absence of observations, and how to detect and allow proper correction of suspicious values arising from observations.