• Ocean and Polar Research
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• 제42권3호
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• pp.195-210
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• 2020

The observed time series from the Korea Ocean Research Stations (KORS) in the Yellow and East China Seas (YECS) have various sources of noise, including bio-fouling on the underwater sensors, intermittent depletion of power, cable leakage, and interference between the sensors' signals. Besides these technical issues, intricate waves associated with background tidal currents tend to result in substantial oscillations in oceanic time series. Such technical and environmental issues require a regionally optimized automatic quality control (QC) procedure. Before the achievement of this ultimate goal, we examined the approach of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)'s standard QC to investigate whether this procedure is pertinent to the KORS. The OOI QC consists of three categorized tests of global/local range of data, temporal variation including spike and gradient, and sensor-related issues associated with its stuck and drift. These OOI QC algorithms have been applied to the water temperature time series from the Ieodo station, one of the KORS. Obvious outliers are flagged successfully by the global/local range checks and the spike check. Both stuck and drift checks barely detected sensor-related errors, owing to frequent sensor cleaning and maintenance. The gradient check, however, fails to flag the remained outliers that tend to stick together closely, as well as often tend to mark probably good data as wrong data, especially data characterized by considerable fluctuations near the thermocline. These results suggest that the gradient check might not be relevant to observations involving considerable natural fluctuations as well as technical issues. Our study highlights the necessity of a new algorithm such as a standard deviation-based outlier check using multiple moving windows to replace the gradient check and an additional algorithm of an inter-consistency check with a related variable to build a standard QC procedure for the KORS.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• 제43권4호
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• pp.229-243
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• 2021

Quality control (QC) to process observed time series has become more critical as the types and amount of observed data have increased along with the development of ocean observing sensors and communication technology. International ocean observing institutions have developed and operated automatic QC procedures for these observed time series. In this study, the performance of automated QC procedures proposed by U.S. IOOS (Integrated Ocean Observing System), NDBC (National Data Buy Center), and OOI (Ocean Observatory Initiative) were evaluated for observed time-series particularly from the Yellow and East China Seas by taking advantage of a confusion matrix. We focused on detecting additive outliers (AO) and temporary change outliers (TCO) based on ocean temperature observation from the Ieodo Ocean Research Station (I-ORS) in 2013. Our results present that the IOOS variability check procedure tends to classify normal data as AO or TCO. The NDBC variability check tracks outliers well but also tends to classify a lot of normal data as abnormal, particularly in the case of rapidly fluctuating time-series. The OOI procedure seems to detect the AO and TCO most effectively and the rate of classifying normal data as abnormal is also the lowest among the international checks. However, all three checks need additional scrutiny because they often fail to classify outliers when intermittent observations are performed or as a result of systematic errors, as well as tending to classify normal data as outliers in the case where there is abrupt change in the observed data due to a sensor being located within a sharp boundary between two water masses, which is a common feature in shallow water observations. Therefore, this study underlines the necessity of developing a new QC algorithm for time-series occurring in a shallow sea.