Quality control of the RMI's AWS wind observations

Abstract

Wind observations are important for a wide range of domains including among others meteorology, agriculture and extreme wind engineering. To ensure the provision of high quality surface wind data over Belgium, a new semi-automated data quality control (QC) has been developed and applied to wind observations from the automated weather stations operated by the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. This new QC applies to 10 m 10 min averaged wind speed and direction, 10 m gust speed and direction, 2 m 10 min averaged wind speed and 30 m 10 min averaged wind speed records. After an existence test, automated procedures check the data for limits consistency, internal consistency, temporal consistency and spatial consistency. At the end of the automated QC, a decision algorithm attributes a flag to each particular data point. Each day, the QC staff analyzes the preceding day's observations in the light of the assigned quality flags.