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The options available on WDQMS web tool control menu when we select to monitor the “quality” (as Monitoring category) of “upper-air” (as NWP monitoring) are described in the Table 13. By selecting the date, time period, monitoring centre and variable, a map will show how the observing network meets the NWP requirements set for the selected variable. The generated map is based on the root mean square error (rmse, section 3.2) calculated for the period and variable of interest. It shows the stations whose observations are considered useful for NWP purposes (greenish dots), and highlights the major anomalies regarding stations with observations that deviate from the model forecasts quite significantly (orange and red dots) and exceed the limits set as “threshold” requirements (Table 7). Clicking on a dot on the map displays a pop-up with a summary of the statistics used to describe the quality of the observations from that station over the selected period. As the quality information is split into two layers (Trop and Stra), we choose to display on the map the worse result of the two. In this way, any quality issue localised in the vertical will be more easily spotted. Moreover, clicking on “Time series” on each pop-up window will display 30-day time series of various statistics (bias and standard deviation for the individual monitoring centre view and rmse for the combined performance report) for the selected interval/variable and atmospheric layer (Table 14).
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