QUASUR: Web-based Quality Assurance System for CEOP Reference Data

抄録

With the recent advances in observation technologies has come a dramatic increase in the amount of Earth environmental data. However, data obtained through sensors often contains a great deal of errors and noise due to system instabilities and related issues. The labor costs to remove such noise and to maintain the quality of the data has become an important issue.
In this paper, we propose a web-based quality assurance system through which the person responsible for the observing system can easily check whether the sensed data are reasonable or not, and can add various kinds of flags to items of data.
The system we developed has actually been used by several investigators at a number of reference sites that are part of the Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP) network ofground truth locations. These users have reported that data quality checking can be done much more efficiently with our system than by other methods. The system is able to simultaneously show various kinds of sensor data so that users can easily check inter-correlations. This correlation assisted quality checking mechanism has proven to be quite effective. There are also many other capabilities that are detailed here. QUASUR-1 was used for the first half of Enhanced Observing Period 3 (October 2002-March 2003) and QUASUR-2 is currently being applied to data collected during the second half of EOP3 (April 2003-September 2003).