Quality Control of Surface Wind Observations in Northeastern North America. Part II: Measurement Errors

Abstract

A quality control (QC) process has been developed and applied to an observational database of surface wind speed and wind direction in northeastern North America. The database combines data from three datasets of different initial quality, including a total of 526 land stations and buoys distributed over the provinces of eastern Canada and five adjacent northeastern U.S. states. The data span from 1953 to 2010. The first part of the QC deals with data management issues and is developed in a companion paper. Part II, presented herein, is focused on the detection of measurement errors and deals with low-variability errors, like the occurrence of unrealistically long calms, and high-variability problems, like rapid changes in wind speed; some types of biases in wind speed and wind direction are also considered. About 0.5% (0.16%) of wind speed (wind direction) records have been flagged. Additionally, 15.87% (1.73%) of wind speed (wind direction) data have been corrected. The most pervasive error type in terms of affected sites and erased data corresponds to unrealistic low wind speeds (89% of sites affected with 0.35% records removed). The amount of detected and corrected/removed records in Part II (~9%) is approximately two orders of magnitude higher than that of Part I. Both management and measurement errors are shown to have a discernible impact on the statistics of the database.