An Overview of ARM Program Climate Research Facility Data Quality Assurance

We present an overview of key aspects of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Climate Research Facility (ACRF) data quality assurance program. Processes described include instrument deployment and cali- bration; instrument and facility maintenance; data collection and processing infrastructure; data stream inspection and as- sessment; problem reporting, review and resolution; data archival, display and distribution; data stream reprocessing; en- gineering and operations management; and the roles of value-added data processing and targeted field campaigns in speci- fying data quality and characterizing field measurements. The paper also includes a discussion of recent directions in ACRF data quality assurance. A comprehensive, end-to-end data quality assurance program is essential for producing a high-quality data set from measurements made by automated weather and climate networks. The processes developed dur- ing the ARM Program offer a possible framework for use by other instrumentation- and geographically-diverse data col- lection networks and highlight the myriad aspects that go into producing research-quality data.