Staff from the National Mooring Network and Deep Water Mooring Facilities recently met for a day of discussion and demonstrations about the quality control of IMOS moorings observations.
The workshop brought together the National Mooring Network and Deep Water Moorings IMOS Facilities and AODN staff to discuss several aspects of their observational sampling workflow, including pre-processing, quality control (QC) and reporting. A novel approach used in this workshop was real-time demonstrations by participants on how they perform QC procedures related to time-series and vertical profile data streams. Participants shared their tips, problems, and solutions to specific quality control issues with the IMOS MATLAB toolbox and in-house solutions.
The talks highlighted:
- current QC procedures,
- a new and automated way to create mooring deployment reports,
- new QC procedures for ocean velocity measurements, and
- an overview of the last 11 years of IMOS MATLAB toolbox development.
Among the talks, a regular feature used by operators outside of the toolbox was the graphical comparisons against climatologies or the new long-time series products created by AODN. New QC tests and extra flexibility in storing and re-using QC test results within the IMOS toolbox were also considered.
The discussions revolved around the 2019 Quality Assurance and Quality Control Summit action plan required IMOS Toolbox features, and documentation improvements. Workshop outcomes included an updated list of toolbox feature requests, and the creation of a task-group that will discuss standardisation of mooring deployment reports across the mooring’s facilities and regional sub-facilities. Enhancements towards the QC documentation are ongoing and supported by specific – per-instrument basis – future QC workshops.
To keep up to date with the way IMOS mooring Facilities do quality control and IMOS Toolbox features, please visit our repository. The IMOS Toolbox is free, open-source software and developed by AODN.