High windspeed values

Thanks to Phil Jones (UEA) and colleagues for pointing out this issue.

There are a number of stations which have wind values of 88 m/s which also stands out as a repeating value (see Figure 1). 

Fig 1. Station 151080-99999 (Ceahlau Toaca, 46.983N, 25.950E, 1898.0m) showing the wind speeds and inhomogeneities (vertical lines).  The cluster of high values between 1991 and 2001 is clear (v2.0.1.2016f).

These may be the result of a mistyped missing data code in the original data.  It is also clear that this station may have rounding or conversion problems - we have not had the chance to investigate in detail so far.

The maximum wind speed used for the record check is 113.3m/s (derived from a maximum gust speed - https://wmo.asu.edu/content/world-maximum-surface-wind-gust), so this would not exclude these values.  The wind speeds are not passed through the distributional or frequent value checks as the shape of the distribution is not gaussian and to this point, these tests have been written assuming this shape.  Nor is the spike check applied.  Therefore, unfortunately, our QC suite is not (yet) clever enough at identifying these erroneous values.

At the current time we do not have a solution to these issues - we would rather make folks aware than try and implement a "quick fix" which causes issues elsewhere.  We will look into this during the course of this year and hope to roll out improvements to the wind QC in the next update.

The stations which have been noted as affected by repeated high values are:
151080-99999
156150-99999
156270-99999
228370-99999





Though others are noted to have one or a few high values.


Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you do spot any issues or would like more information on these.