NIKLAS

NIKLAS is our software for quality controlling meteorological station data. NIKLAS was developed as a part of a forecast- and warning system for the river Mosel, which is run by the Landesamt für Umwelt, Wasserwirtschaft und Gewerbeaufsicht Rheinland-Pfalz.
The software NIKLAS is checking time series of the following parameters:

rainfall
global radiation
sunshine duration
temperature

dew point temperature
relative humidity
wind velocity
atmospheric pressure

The procedure of the quality control was setup to first work on the simple cases, followed by the difficult cases. These procedure steps are performed:

check for missing data
check for of physically impossible data
check for sections with constant data

check for unlikely zero values
check for unlikely low values
check for unlikely high values

In addition, NIKLAS checks the variability and the inner consistency of data while using familiar relations for example between temperature and dew point temperature. The result of the tests is categorized into three different levels: valid, limited quality and bad quality.

NIKLAS is working as a pure controlling tool and deletes data intervals with bad quality from the time series and replaces it with a gap marker.

NIKLAS is a windows application with a graphic user interface. It has been successfully used for real time applications (Mosel flood warning system TIMISflood) and has been used for offline data control for climate change analyses (ExUS (climate study for North Rhine Westphalia); Sachsen-Anhalt climate study).