Design of common protocols for data collection, transmission and quality control

Thomas H. Badewien and Siegfried Krueger

PAPA Report, EVR1-CT-2002-20012, www. boos.org/papa/papa.html

The upgrade of an operational observing and forecasting system in the Baltic Sea is the overall task of the PAPA project. Within the scope of BOOS, high quality data sets and long time series are needed. In order to obtain high quality data, common protocols for quality control are essential.
Within PAPA OBS (WP3) task 3.2 and task 3.3 common protocols have been developed. They are based on the evaluation of basic data pre-processing procedures and existing quality assurance (QA) protocols.

The main objective of quality control for operational data is to ensure data consistency for each measured parameter within a collection of operational data. One of the most important goals must be to assure that the quality and errors associated with the data are transparent to the user. Therefore, additional quality assurance procedures have to be applied and meta data must be collected regularly as quality assurance information. Data quality assurance information notifies users of the data about the way in which they were gathered, checked, and processed. It also provides information about the types of algorithms used, the kinds of errors that occurred, and how these errors were corrected or flagged.