Quality Assurance and Control

Quality assurance and control is fundamental to ensuring the scientific usefulness of atmospheric measurements. Quality is relevant to all stages of data generation, from site selection and system design to all physical components of a measurement system (including their calibration, operation, and maintenance) as well as data handling and processing. This chapter describes useful practices and techniques for a comprehensive quality management program that is designed to minimize problems and quantify quality along the entire data generation chain. Widely applicable methods of post-field data quality control for instrumented (in-situ), visual, and remotely sensed observations are presented. The chapter concludes with example applications of QA/QC in measurement networks, and a discussion of common data problems. Finally, future developments in quality assurance and quality control are presented.