A spatial quality control method, ARF, is proposed. The ARF method incorporates the optimization ability of the artificial fish swarm algorithm and the random forest regression function to provide quality control for multiple surface air temperature stations. Surface air temperature observations were recorded at stations in mountainous and plain regions and at neighboring stations to test the performance of the method. Observations from 2005 to 2013 were used as a training set, and observations from 2014 were used as a testing set. The results indicate that the ARF method is able to identify inaccurate observations; and it has a higher rate of detection, lower rate of change for the quality control parameters, and fewer type I errors than traditional methods. Notably, the ARF method yielded low performance indexes in areas with complex terrain, where traditional methods were considerably less effective. In addition, for stations near the ocean without sufficient neighboring stations, different neighboring stations were used to test the different methods. Whereas the traditional methods were affected by station distribution, the ARF method exhibited fewer errors and higher stability. Thus, the method is able to effectively reduce the effects of geographical factors on spatial quality control.

An improved kernel regression (IKR) method based on an adaptive algorithm and particle swarm optimization is proposed. Considering the limitations of current quality control methods in different regions and on multiple time scales, the kernel regression algorithm is applied to the quality control of surface air temperature observations. Observations of 12 reference stations in Jiangsu from 1961 to 2008 and of 14 regions in China from 2010 to 2014 were selected. The analysis of surface air temperature observations was performed in terms of the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), consistency indicator (IOA), and Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient (NSC). The results indicate that compared with the traditional IDW and SRT methods, the IKR method has a high error detection rate. Furthermore, the IKR method achieves better predictions and fitting in the single-station and multistation regression experiments in Jiangsu and in the national multistation regression prediction experiment.

This article proposed a new quality control method (CS-MSF) to identify potential outliers in the surface temperature observations. The CS-MSF method employed cosine similarity and moving surface fitting to obtain the estimated value of the target station. For the regions with complex terrain and low weather station density, another quality control method (CE-GBDT) was employed to compensate for the shortcomings of CS-MSF. Compared to the spatial regression test method (SRT) and inverse distance weighting method (IDW), the results indicated that CS-MSF outperformed SRT and IDW in all the cases. And CE-GBDT was superior to the other methods for the regions with complex terrain and low weather station density. The comparison results led to the recommendation that the two proposed methods are effective quality control methods in identifying the seeded errors for the surface temperature observations.