Abstract:

Based on the correlative relationship between  pressure and altitude, the station pressure is corrected to the median height of pressure altitudes, and then a staged spatial consistency check method for hourly station pressure was proposed, including the coarse grain quality and fine grain quality controls. Taking sea level pressure as a reference element, the rationality and applicability were discussed. The median pressure was applied to the station pressure spatial consistency check by analyzing the spatial variability of pressure. The artificial implantation error was introduced to make a quantitative analysis for the error detecting ability. This method was evaluated using the data from 2420 national automatic weather stations in China in 2015. The results show that the median pressure can be used to carry out the station pressure spatial consistency check. It is more stable and its spatial variability is less than the sea level pressure, especially in high altitude areas. However, it is more sensitive to the small error. The error detection rate of median pressure is greater than that of the sea level pressure when the different implantation errors are applied in different seasons. The smaller the error is, the higher the growth rate is. When the error detection rate is above 90%, the implantation error is 2.5 hPa in different seasons. The maximum value appears in summer with 98%. The staged quality control strategy effectively reduces the time complexity of the algorithm. The execution time meets the requirements of real-time operation. Meanwhile, this method can effectively detect the error data. The detection rate is about 0.01%.

Key words: Hourly station pressure, Quality control, Spatial consistency check, Pressure Correction, Spatial variability, Implantation error