Improving quality control tools and procedures for ARM value-added products
Authors
Justin Monroe — University of Oklahoma
Kathy J. Lazar — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Sherman Beus — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Randy A. Peppler — University of Oklahoma
Category
Infrastructure & Outreach
Description
Recently, the development life cycle for ARM value-added products (VAPs) was updated to include a more efficient and well-defined set of procedures. As a result of these updates, the ARM Climate Research Facility Data Quality (DQ) Office now maintains a more active role in the quality control (QC) of these products. Due to the additional complexity often inherent in VAPs when compared to instrument-level products, the DQ Office developed new tools and procedures to more effectively handle this task.
One of these tools is DQ Inspector, a command-line plotting utility that is very effective for reviewing VAPs in the evaluation stage prior to official release. Another new tool is DQ Explorer, a web application that incorporates several new features that greatly improve the ability of the DQ Office to perform routine QC assessment of production VAPs. Collaborations between the DQ Office and government labs within ARM have also led to useful updates to the ARM DQ Assessment system, which now allows users to quickly access relevant reports for VAP input datastreams.