ARM Climate Research Facility Data Quality Office
Authors
Sean T. Moore — Orbital ATK Inc.
Kenneth Kehoe — University of Oklahoma
Justin Monroe — University of Oklahoma
Randy A. Peppler — University of Oklahoma
Adam Theisen — Argonne National Laboratory
Category
Infrastructure & Outreach
Description
The Data Quality Office coordinates the ARM Climate Research Facility’s efforts to produce datastreams of quality suitable for scientific research. With the Data Quality Office, the Instrument Team, site scientists, and others within the ARM Facility regularly review and assess ARM's datastreams for problems. Data quality analysis results are then communicated to data users as well as to ARM's site operators and engineers. This data quality program helps minimize the amount of unacceptable data collected and helps ensure that informed decisions are made when people use the data.The Data Quality Office has developed a wide variety of tools to assist those within the ARM infrastructure in their quest to improve data quality. These tools include interactive and pre-generated web-based graphics to explore data, long time-series of measurements to detect trends, frequency distributions to assess typical behavior, and color-coded metrics tables and graphics to convey problems. These tools are being upgraded to take advantage of machine-readable data quality reports, now available to data users via a publicly accessible web service. It is hoped that this immediate feedback of showing how data quality reports can assist in better filtering and use of ARM data will encourage more timely and more accurate reporting of future problems.