Emerging Methodologies Applied to Automated Data Quality Control.

Abstract

Oceanographers have faced three specific challenges for the past half-century: limited electrical power, challenging data telemetry, and biofouling. Amazing advances are being made in all three areas, and substantial benefits are already being realized for the more agile operators. These advances lead to more robust deployments with extended durations, which is a highly desired outcome since recovery and redeployment are usually expensive efforts that are generally associated with a data gap.

Still, the need for quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and best practices (BP) remains, and multiple entities within the oceanographic community are working to establish standards. This white paper, submitted to the JCOMM / DBCP Task Team for Data Management at the 34th DBCP meeting, describe advances that have been made to, as well as emerging QA, QC, and BPs that can be used to ensure quality data. We thank Shannon McArthur / NDBC for the suggestion.