Data Quality Application Gives Data Browsers a New View

 
Published: 15 October 2004

Plot Browser, now available through the Data Quality Health and Status (DQ HandS) program, eases viewing by providing lists or thumbnail images of selected data streams.

The ARM Climate Research Facility’s Data Quality Office has developed a new way to help data quality analysts, instrument mentors, and site scientists quickly and easily view diagnostic data quality plots, without making multiple selections to see just one plot. The new Plot Browser is a part of the Data Quality Health and Status (DQ Hands) application, which also automatically generates color-coded tables of data quality control checks on both a daily and an hourly basis in near real-time. The new view works with all the daily plots (around a 1,000 per day) from the ARM Climate Research Facility sites to produce custom, highly-browsable lists or thumbnail images of data streams suitable for monitoring data quality.

By using DQ HandS and the Plot Browser to perform visual data quality inspections, the Data Quality Office can inspect and assess ARM data on a near real-time basis (daily to weekly) and submit requests to site operators to initiate troubleshooting and/or corrective maintenance activities, if needed. By comparing data streams from different instruments, the quality of the data is assessed based on guidelines developed by instrument mentors. If a problem is identified, mentors, site operators, and site scientists are notified to start the problem resolution process and/or continue to investigate. This level of vigilance helps the ARM Climate Research Facility deliver data streams of reasonable quality to the scientific community.