Automation: A Step toward Improving the Quality of Daily Temperature Data Produced by Climate Observing Networks

Abstract

The research documented in this manuscript demonstrates that undeniable differences exist between values of daily temperature recorded by the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program network and data recorded by the Oklahoma Mesonet. Because of this fact, a transition to automated observations would have the effect of changing the climate record for Oklahoma. However, the change to automated observations would produce an improvement in overall data quality. A sampling of daily data from the two networks was compared for closely spaced station pairs for the period 1 January 2003 through 31 December 2005. As a result, a host of observer errors were discovered (including transcription errors, incorrectly resetting the manual sensors, and delaying the observation time). These errors created large daily differences that sometimes exceeded 5°C between the two datasets. More than 55% of the paired observations were found to differ by more than 1°C.