Optimizing Spatial Quality Control for a Dense Network of Meteorological Stations

Abstract

Crowdsourced meteorological observations are becoming more prevalent and in some countries their spatial resolution already far exceeds that of traditional networks. However, due to the larger uncertainty associated with these observations, quality control (QC) is an essential step. Spatial QC methods are especially well suited for such dense networks since they utilize information from nearby stations. The performance of such methods usually depends on the choice of their parameters. There is, however, currently no specific procedure on how to choose the optimal settings of such spatial QC methods. In this study we present a framework for tuning a spatial QC method for a dense network of meteorological observations. The method uses artificial errors in order to perturb the observations to simulate the effect of having errors. A cost function, based on the hit and false alarm rate, for optimizing the spatial QC method is introduced. The parameters of the spatial QC method are then tuned such that the cost function is optimized. The application of the framework to the tuning of a spatial QC method for a dense network of crowdsourced observations in Denmark is presented. Our findings show that the optimal settings vary with the error magnitude, time of day, and station density. Furthermore, we show that when the station network is sparse, a better performance of the spatial QC method can be obtained by including crowdsourced observations from another denser network.