Data Quality Control Method of a New Drifting Observation Technology Named Drifting Air-Sea Interface Buoy

An integral quality control (QC) procedure that integrates various QC methods and considers the design indexes and operational status of the instruments for the observations of drifting air-sea interface buoy was developed in the order of basic inspection followed by targeted QC. The innovative method of combining a moving Hampel filter and local anomaly detection complies with statistical laws and physical processes, which guarantees the QC performance of meteorological variables. Two sets of observation data were used to verify the applicability and effectiveness of the QC procedure, and the effect was evaluated using the observations of the Kuroshio Extension Observatory buoy as the reference. The results showed that the outliers in the time series can be correctly identified and processed, and the quality of data improved significantly. The linear correlation between the quality- controlled observations and the reference increased, and the difference decreased. The correlation coefficient of wind speed before and after QC increased from 0.77 to 0.82, and the maximum absolute error decreased by approximately 2.8 m s−1. In addition, air pressure and relative humidity were optimized by 10−3–10−2 orders of magnitude. For the sea surface temperature, the weight of coefficients of the continuity test algorithm was optimized based on the sea area of data acquisition, which effectively expanded the applicability of the algorithm.