Overview
One of the goals of the ARM Program is to provide data streams of reasonable quality for scientific research. Traditionally, data quality issues have been addressed within ARM at several levels, including by instrument mentors, site scientists, value-added product scientists, and Science Team members at large. Maintaining data quality for a program of the size and complexity of ARM is a significant challenge — our efforts toward this end have matured and evolved over the life of the program.
The ARM Program Data Quality (DQ) Office, established in July 2000, conducts a data quality program to ensure the quality of the data collected by ARM field instrumentation. The DQ Office has the responsibility for ensuring that quality assurance results are communicated to 1) data users so that they may make informed decisions when using the data, and 2) ARM's site operators and engineers to facilitate optimal instrument performance and minimize the amount of unacceptable data collected. The full ARM quality crontrol process involves many other dedicated professionals to ensure the highest level of confidence in the data. A full description of the process can be found in an ARM technical report.
On this page you will find links to our Data Quality Health and Status (DQ HandS) tool that allows us to inspect and assess ARM data on a near real-time basis and our interactive data plotting tool, NCVweb. Also provided are links to the ARM Report Search Tool, and an archive of weekly Data Quality Assessment Reports.
Questions and comments about the Data Quality Office, or specific ARM datastreams can be directed to Randy Peppler, Ken Kehoe, Justin Monroe, or Sean Moore.
The ARM quality control process
