A QUALITY-CONTROL ROUTINE FOR HOURLY WIND OBSERVATIONS

The quality of hourly wind speed and direction observations from 41 no rtheastern U.S. first-order weather stations is evaluated with regard to the recognition of individual observations that are either obviousl y in error or of suspect qualify. An automated quality-control routine is developed to screen these individual hourly wind reports obtained from the National Climatic Data Center TD-3280 dataset. Using this rou tine, observations are assessed based on their internal consistency (i .e., 1-min average winds must not exceed the daily peak gust), tempora l variability, and spatial consistency. The evaluation of over 12.5 mi llion hourly observations indicated that the quality of these hourly d ata is quite good. Fewer than 0.1% of the values, occurring on 2.1% of the days, fail the quality-control checks.