The QCRad Value Added Product: Surface Radiation Measurement Quality Control Testing, Including Climatology Configurable Limits

This document describes the QCRad methodology, which uses climatological analyses of the surface radiation measurements to define reasonable limits for testing the data for unusual data values. The main assumption is that the majority of the climatological data are “good” data, which for field sites operated with care such as those of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is a reasonable assumption. Data that fall outside the normal range of occurrences are labeled either “indeterminate” (meaning that the measurements are possible, but rarely occurring, and thus the values cannot be identified as good) or “bad” depending on how far outside the normal range the particular data reside. The methodology not only sets fairly standard maximum and minimum value limits, but also compares what we have learned about the behavior of these instruments in the field to other value-added products (VAPs), such as the Diffuse infrared (IR) Loss Correction VAP (Younkin and Long 2004) and the Best Estimate Flux VAP (Shi and Long 2002).