We strive to produce only high-quality meteorological data from our weather stations. Much of this reliability is the result of our rigorous site-visit protocols, routine sensor swaps, and calibration procedures. We manually review data from all Utah Climate Center (UCC) managed stations on a weekly basis to identify any sensor issues or other factors affecting data quality.

When a station is undergoing service for cleaning, sensor replacement, or calibration, calibration flags are applied to prevent invalid data from entering the database. In addition, our near real-time data streams are screened before reaching the final database to remove questionable or unreasonable values based on the following criteria:

• Air temperature spike detection and removal
• Relative humidity range checks
• Solar radiation nighttime noise filtering
• ET calculations performed only when all required variables are present and valid
• Precipitation filtering based on wetness sensor thresholds and noise filtering
• Soil temperature range checks and erroneous value filtering
• Wetness sensor filtering to reduce noise-to-signal ratios

More expansive near real-time QAQC flags can be found for all our sites on the Synoptic Data Viewer portal: Link to Synoptic Data Viewer

Detailed information about these flags are available from Synoptic:

We are currently developing and implementing an internal Python-based tool, WeClimate-py (Python for Weather and Climate Analysis), designed by Megumi Chikamoto at the Utah Climate Center. This system will support comprehensive quality assurance and quality control for historical datasets within our data archive.

Additional details about this QAQC tool can be found here: