A Quality Control Method for Wind Profiler Observations toward Assimilation Applications

Abstract

AbstractA wind profiler network with a total of 65 profiling radar systems was operated by the China Meteorological Observation Center (MOC) of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) until July 2015. In this study, a quality control procedure is constructed to incorporate the profiler data from the wind-profiling network into the local data assimilation and forecasting systems. The procedure applies a blacklisting check that removes stations with gross errors and an outlier check that rejects data with large deviations from the background. As opposed to the biweight method, which has been commonly implemented in outlier elimination for univariate observations, the outlier elimination method is developed based on the iterated reweighted minimum covariance determinant (IRMCD) for multivariate observations, such as wind profiler data. A quality control experiment is performed separately for subsets containing profiler data tagged with/without rain flags in parallel every 0000 and 1200 UTC from 20 June to 30 September 2015. The results show that with quality control, the frequency distributions of the differences between the observations and the model background meet the requirements of a Gaussian distribution for data assimilation. A further intensive assessment of each quality control step reveals that the stations rejected by the blacklisting contained poor data quality and that the IRMCD rejects outliers in a robust and physically reasonable manner. Detailed comparisons between the IRMCD and the biweight method are performed, and the IRMCD is demonstrated to be more efficient and more comprehensive regarding the dataset used in this study.