WIGOS Data Quality Monitoring System at ECMWF

This document summarises ECMWF’s participation in the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) effort to modernize the monitoring of the global observing system (GOS) focusing on the benefits that our engagement can bring to the monitoring of in situ observations at ECMWF. WMO is developing a modern system for the quality management of the surface-based component of the WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS). ECMWF, the German Weather Service (DWD), the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) have contributed to the pilot development phase of the project. The proposed system, WDQMS itself has the potential to bring far-reaching benefits in terms of improvement of WMO management of in-situ components of WIGOS concerning the quality of the observations and of the associated station metadata (available in the OSCAR/Surface database). The NWP community benefits not only from a higher-quality network, but also from near-real-time access to comparable quality monitoring data from several global NWP centres. This has already proved to be beneficial for ECMWF, helping to detect (and subsequently resolve) differences in data reception and differences in data usage (e.g. differences in quality control, station height and other metadata) as shown in this document.