Quality controls of temperature and precipitation time series

The systematic assessment of climate variability and change at the national scale requires the development of a national climatic dataset of quality controlled daily observations, originating from different available sources and observational networks.This report describes the quality assurance procedure for temperature and precipitation series, applied to the Italian dataset of daily observations, still in progress. This procedure consists of a sequence of several tests to detect different kind of errors: duplicate data, impossible values, outliers, inconsistencies (internal, temporal and spatial inconsistencies). It has been developed on the basis of quality control systems of different international Institutions responsible of climate data collection and dissemination, in particular the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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