Quality Assurance
Data of known quality in terms of precision, accuracy, and representativeness are of paramount importance for the documentation of changes in atmospheric composition and the evaluation of the underlying causes and for the testing of models that are employed for the prediction of the future. Today, the technology exists to make accurate measurements of greenhouse gases, ozone and its precursors, and simple volatile organic compounds, even under the restricted conditions applying to monitoring networks. Complementary methods have been developed at several European institutes for the measurement of major free radicals involved in atmospheric chemistry and for the complex suite of biogenic and anthropogenic organic compounds and their oxidation products, which have been identified as important precursors for radicals in the upper troposphere and influence aerosol composition. The operation of instrumentation with different degrees of specificity and the lack of harmonised quality assurance proced ures makes it difficult for data users to have a clear picture of the comparability of data sets from different sources. The situation is even more difficult for physical and chemical aerosol measurement, despite the progress made in the past decades.
An integrated activity for quality assurance that joins the efforts and complementary capabilities of the participating institutions and reaches out to monitoring networks and newcomers will therefore considerably strengthen the European research area in atmospheric composition and climate change. This activity will feed into many tasks of ACCENT thereby significantly improving the knowledge of the atmosphere system and, via the testing and improvement of numerical models, its predictability. Well documented data quality will also help future generations to evaluate atmospheric change and to identify new hazards.
The objectives of the QA/QC activities are: to establish a common understanding between data providers and data users of the requirements and the limitations of observational data; to improve the European capability of providing relevant atmospheric data sets for the testing of models and for the analysis of relevant atmospheric processes; to contribute to the interpretation of data sets from monitoring networks by assessment of the data quality; to provide guidance for improvements in data quality by training and technology transfer from established research institutions to newcomers; to establish QA/QC procedures for intensive field studies of gas phase and aerosol measurements.
The assessment of research instruments to be deployed for scientific measurements such as field campaigns will be based upon instrument comparisons in ambient air and under controlled conditions, in addition to the harmonisation of standards and reference methods. The Data Quality Objectives (DQOs) will be established in workshops in close interaction with modelling activities and satellite data retrieval, in order to provide definitions of the most suitable data sets for model evaluation and ground truthing.
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Intercomparison of NO3 / N2O5 Instruments at the Atmosphere Simulation Chamber SAPHIR |
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Project coordinator: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. coordinator@accent-network.org Project Office: Università di Urbino. project.office@accent-network.org Web-coordinator: Norwegian Institute for Air Research. mail@accent-network.org ACCENT Disclaimer |