Observation-quality estimation and its application in the NCAR/ATEC real-time fdda and forecast (RTFDDA) system

The construction of a simple and efficient observation data quality control (QC) procedure for the multi-scale rapidly cycling real time FDDA and forecasting system was discussed. The QC procedure could objectively define the error tolerance criteria for elimination of most bad observations. The procedure could also estimate and assign a generalized quality flag to each individual observations, without regard to the platform by which it was observed. Results of numerical experiments conducted over a five-day period demonstrated a significant increase in the computational efficiency of the new QC because of its ability to skip many quality checking strategies used in traditional QC procedures.