AQUAS - A Data Quality Control tool at GeoSphere Austria

The station network of the Austrian Weather Service GeoSphere Austria comprises about 260 semi-automatic weather stations called TAWES. The observation data collected by TAWES are checked for plausibility and completeness in several steps. The main quality control is based on an automated tool called AQUAS (short for Austria Quality Service). The software was developed at ZAMG (now GeoSphere Austria) in Vienna as part of quality management in the area of real-time processing of near-surface observation data.
The basis for quality control is formed by standard methods for checking meteorological and climatological data (e.g. plausibility check, temporal, spatial and internal consistency check, etc.), which are continuously improved and further developed within the framework of AQUAS. The individual system components are designed to test the incoming observation parameters in real time. For the greatest possible flexibility, each parameter can be processed autonomously, independently of the other measured variables of a weather station. In addition, data from other sources such as radar and satellite data as well as data from numerical weather prediction models and data from other measurement networks, like hydrological network or any other third-party network, can also be implemented in AQUAS.
Some examples for the operational use of AQUAS and the current state of research on quality control procedures are presented. As an example, a method for real-time quality control of 10-minute wind speed data is shown, which detects doubtful wind gust peaks. Another example on the basiss of daily data shows a method using daily sums of global radiation and sunshine duration to detect instrument malfunctions.