A quality control procedure for daily rainfall series in a semiarid environment (Andalusia)

What is it about?

A quality control procedure has been applied to a large database of 15,857,892 daily rainfall measurements from 1,947 stations of three meteorological networks (Spanish Meteorological Agency, Agroclimatic Information Network of Andalusia and Phytosanitary Information Alert Network) operating in the semiarid region of Andalusia (Southern Spain), from 1870 to the present. This work has implemented a comprehensive spatial quality control procedure which consists of three consecutive steps: basic, absolute and relative quality control processes. The latter step compares data from neighbour stations taking into account their proximity, height difference and correlation, leading to a complete evaluation of each daily value. Finally, the quality of each year at each station can be declared as acceptable, good or excellent. Despite the limitations of Andalusia region (low density of stations and its structural water deficit), the complete quality control procedure has been satisfactorily applied.

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Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash

Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The availability of quality precipitation records in the current climate situation is of great importance in the scientific-technical field but also for the public institutions that manage the meteorological networks. Quality assurance of precipitation data is crucial for the reliability of applications and models that use them as input variables, as well as for an adequate representativeness of the statistics derived from the raw time series.