Autonomous Quality Control of High Spatiotemporal Resolution Automatic Weather Station Precipitation Data
Authors: Ouyang Hongxiang , Qin Zhengkun , Xu Xingsheng , Xu Yuan , Huangfu Jiang , Li Xiaomin , Hu Jiahui , Zhan Zixuan , Yu Junjie 
Published: January 2025

How to prevent the influence of precipitation’s localized and sudden characteristics is the most formidable challenge in the quality control (QC) of precipitation observations. However, with sufficiently high spatiotemporal resolution in observational data, nuanced information can aid us in accurately distinguishing between intense, localized precipitation events, and anomalies in precipitation data. China has deployed over 70,000 automatic weather stations (AWSs) that provide high spatiotemporal resolution surface meteorological observations. This study developed a new method for performing QC of precipitation data based on the high spatiotemporal resolution characteristics of observations from surface AWSs in China. The proposed QC algorithm uses the cumulative average method to standardize the probability distribution characteristics of precipitation data and further uses the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) decomposition method to effectively identify the small-scale spatial structure of precipitation data. Leveraging the spatial correlation characteristics of precipitation, partitioned EOF detection with a 0.5° spatial coverage effectively minimizes the influence of local precipitation on quality control. Analysis of precipitation probability distribution reveals that reconstruction based on the first three EOF modes can accurately capture the organized structural features of precipitation within the detection area. Thereby, based on the randomness characteristics of the residuals, when the residual of a certain observation is greater than 2.5 times the standard deviation calculated from all residuals in the region, it can be determined that the data are erroneous. Although the quality control is primarily aimed at accumulated precipitation, the randomness of erroneous data indicates that 84 continuous instances of error data in accumulated precipitation can effectively trace back to erroneous hourly precipitation observations. This ultimately enables the QC of hourly precipitation data from surface AWSs. Analysis of the QC of precipitation data from 2530 AWSs in Jiangxi Province (China) revealed that the new method can effectively identify incorrect precipitation data under the conditions of extreme weather and complex terrain, with an average rejection rate of about 5%. The EOF-based QC method can accurately detect strong precipitation events resulting from small-scale weather disturbances, thereby preventing local heavy rainfall from being incorrectly classified as erroneous data. Comparison with the quality control results in the Tianqing System, an operational QC system of the China Meteorological Administration, revealed that the proposed method has advantages in handling extreme and scattered outliers, and that the precipitation observation data, following quality control procedures, exhibits enhanced similarity with the CMAPS merged precipitation data. The novel quality control approach not only elevates the average spatial correlation coefficient between the two datasets by 0.01 but also diminishes the root mean square error by 1 mm.