The National Ecological Observatory Network’s Fundamental Instrument Unit (FIU) is responsible for making airshed and watershed observations at 60 different sites across the continent. FIU will provide data on key local physical, climate and chemical forcings, as well as the biotic responses (CO2, H2O and energy exchanges). The shear volume of data that will be generated far exceeds that of any other ecological network or agency, (i.e., greater than 45 Tb/year from 10’s of thousands of remotely deployed sensors). We address the question of how to develop and implement a large ecological observatory that can accommodate such a large volume of data that is of high quality. Here, we describe our quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) program to produce quality data while leveraging cyber infrastructure tools and optimizing technician time.
Results/Conclusions
Results focus on novel approaches that advance the principles and dataflows used historically (DOE ARM, AmeriFlux, USDA ARS, OK Mesonet) to new state-of-the-art functionality. These automated and semi-automated approaches are also used to inform automated problem tracking to efficiently deploy field technicians—departing from the models of using post docs, resident technicians, and graduate students. Here, we articulate our overarching philosophy of attaining the highest levels of accuracy, precision, and operational time, while efficiently optimizing the effort needed to produce quality data products. Our programmatic results will address the challenges associated with automated implementation of command/control, QA/QC, and data verification on FIU observations.