A Research on the Application of Spatial Difference Method in Quality Control of Surface Meteorological Data

A new Quality Control（QC）technique called spatial difference method is introduced in detail and applied to spatial checking of some basic meteorological elements at seven representative stations in China for the year of 2007 in order to evaluate the applicability of this approach．The checking tests are conducted on ten basic meteorological elements including daily mean pressure，maximum pressure，minimum pressure，mean temperature，maximum temperature，minimum temperature，mean vapor pressure，mean surface temperature, maximum surface temperature, and minimum surface temperature．It is shown that this method works well in identifying errors of single meteorological element．As compared with spatial regression test on discriminating artificial errors，the spatial difference method is more effective．Furthermore，same as the other spatial checking methods，the distribution of neighboring weather stations should be concerned necessarily as influence factors．