IMPROVE Policy for Review and Dissemination of Aerosol Data

4/5/02

This policy is being instituted to allow states, tribes, FLM’s or any other organization with in interest in and specific knowledge of aerosol conditions at any of the IMPROVE or IMPROVE Protocol sites an opportunity to review and comment on the accuracy, credibility, and/or representativeness of aerosol speciation data collected.  This policy attempts to provide a review opportunity without substantially delaying the appropriate uses of the IMPROVE aerosol data.

All data posted on the IMPROVE web site has been subject to extensive data validation procedures and are thought to be of sufficient quality for use in support of federal visibility rules.  Meta data and flags in the data files are used to alert users to any issues concerning the quality characteristics of the data.  However, IMPROVE management recognizes that data quality issues can be missed by validation procedures, and more over that occasionally purely local situations can affect data for one or more sample periods resulting in non-representative data (e.g. smoke from a nearby structure fire).  Therefore IMPROVE invites those who are in a position to know about such situations to bring them to our attention so that data can be either appropriately flagged or if the problem is sufficiently egregious it can be removed.  IMPROVE management reserves the right to determine the appropriate response to problems identified by this process.

Policy

All IMPROVE and IMPROVE Protocol aerosol data for sample periods beginning in calendar year 2002 will be posted on the IMPROVE web site in a “Data Review Page” for a period of 30 days.  Aerosol data are processed in batches by calendar quarters, so data will be posted to the Data Review Page four times per year.  Access to the Data Review Page will be granted to anyone who registers.  The access by registered reviewers will be logged by the web system in order to allow subsequent communication from IMPROVE should there be a need to announce data changes resulting from the review process.  Data posted to the Data Review Page can be viewed from the web site or downloaded as comma or space delimited files or as Excel files.  The data summary and display capabilities of the IMPROVE web site will be disabled for data on the Data Review Page to discourage its inappropriate use for technical or policy assessments.

Specific comments concerning the quality and representativeness of the data for specific sites and sample periods received via email to the IMPROVE web master within 30 data of their posting will be reviewed within 10 working days.  All registered users who have reviewed data for a calendar quarter will be notified of the changes and/or flags that were applied as a result of this data review.  To minimize delays in making the data fully available for use by the public, the goal is to move the reviewed data to the data archive section of the IMPROVE database within 45 days of its posting to the Data Review Page.