Abstract:
The Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool (Swiss MDMT) offers a solution to a frequent data management problem encountered when compiling longitudinal datasets involving Swiss municipalities as the observational units. Due to municipal mergers, the number of municipalities in Switzerland declined from 3,095 in 1960 to 2,202 in 2020. As a consequence, manually securing the correct spatial reference when merging historical cross-sectional data is tedious and time-consuming. To facilitate this operation, the Swiss MDMT considers mutations at the municipal level and maps municipalities of a first point in time to municipalities in a second point in time based on information provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office’s municipality inventory. The tool is distributed as an open-source R package and is freely available on CRAN.
Abstract:
We present a quality control algorithm to detect spurious precipitation events, which occur at weighing rain gauges in the automated precipitation monitoring network of MeteoSwiss. Although small in intensity, the spurious precipitation events must be removed during routine quality control, because they have a negative impact on climatological and meteorological applications of precipitation data. Automated monitoring, expert inspection and systematic analysis lead to the hypothesis that spurious precipitation is induced by rapid temperature changes at the load cell of the weighing rain gauge. Constrained by the black box nature of the signal processing performed by the firmware, we trained a statistical classifier on features extracted from measurements provided by the weighing gauge, and expert labels obtained from the routine quality control. The high sensitivity and specificity of the trained Support Vector Machine provide strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis. Furthermore, the classifier is suitable for operational deployment as an automated real-time quality control test, flagging individual 10‑minute precipitation intensities as either spurious or non-spurious. Our results also suggest that a modification of the instrument should be possible, such that it will not generate spurious measurements in the first place. We are therefore collaborating with the manufacturer on possible software and hardware improvements to the instrument.