Preliminary Data Validation and Reconstruction of Temperature and Precipitation in Central Italy

Abstract

This study provides a unique procedure for validating and reconstructing temperature and precipitation data. Although developed from data in Middle Italy, the validation method is intended to be universal, subject to appropriate calibration according to the climate zones analysed. This research is an attempt to create shared applicative procedures that are most of the time only theorized or included in some software without a clear definition of the methods. The purpose is to detect most types of errors according to the procedures for data validation prescribed by the World Meteorological Organization, defining practical operations for each of the five types of data controls: gross error checking, internal consistency check, tolerance test, temporal consistency, and spatial consistency. Temperature and precipitation data over the period 1931-2014 were investigated. The outcomes of this process have led to the removal of 375 records (0.02%) of temperature data from 40 weather stations and 1286 records (1.67%) of precipitation data from 118 weather stations, and 171 data points reconstructed. In conclusion, this work contributes to the development of standardized methodologies to validate climate data and provides an innovative procedure to reconstruct missing data in the absence of reliable reference time series.

A new homogenized daily data set for temperature variability assessment in Italy

“…With regard to Italy, its long tradition in climate observations makes a large number of data series potentially available to the climatology community and final users (Brunetti et al, 2006;Maugeri et al, 2008;Acquaotta et al, 2016). Several papers document the use of such data for climate analysis at the scale of Italian regions, like in Marche (Gentilucci et al, 2018), Emilia-Romagna (Tomozeiu et al, 2006), Calabria (Federico et al, 2010), Sardinia (Chessa et al, 1999), Trentino (Eccel et al, 2012), Piedmont (Acquaotta et al, 2016), along with reports from various regional environmental agencies. At the national level, the use of the synoptic stations from the Italian Air Force National Meteorological Service (henceforth AM) is documented, inter alia, in Toreti and Desiato (2008), who used 49 AM stations to analyse seasonal temperatures from 1961from to 2006from , and in Fioravanti et al (2016, who used stations from AM and two regional networks to assess the temporal and spatial variability of the ETCCDI climate extreme indices (Peterson et al, 2001) for the period 1961-2011.…”

Climatic Variations in Central Italy

“…were removed [9]and precipitation measurements greater than 2000 mm were also excluded [8]. The internal consistency check verified the consistency of the data: for example, whether a maximum value was higher than a minimum one, for temperature, and if there were negative values for precipitation.…”

“…In the case of temporal consistency, the deletion of data is not immediate, but was subject to the spatial consistency. The spatial consistency was performed taking into consideration the neighbouring weather stations, grouped on the basis of their similarity [8]. After validation, climate data were homogenized through the creation of a reference time series for each candidate weather station.…”

Characteristics of Heavy Storms and the Scaling Relation with Air Temperature by Event Process-Based Analysis in South China

“…The data duration was 28 months, from July 2015 to October 2017. All of the climate data were validated by using quality control procedures [35][36][37].…”