Use of quality assurance procedures for FTIR field measurement data

The OP-FTIR measurement technique and other remote sensing systems (for example UV-DOAS and TDL) become more and more established methods to monitor the ambient air quality. Some quality assurance procedures have to be done on the field measurement data to get more reliable results. Both the German and US-EPA standardization documents for the OP-FTIR technique prescribe such procedures to check the data. To assess the applicability of these procedures, OP-FTIR field measurement data of a three month continuous measurement campaign were evaluated concerning the signal strength, the influence of stray light, water vapor concentration, baseline noise, wave number shifts and the detection limits. In addition the long time signal stability of the OP-FTIR systems and the UV-DOAS systems are intercompared. The results of the several quality assurance procedures will be presented in this paper.