ISO Explanatory Library

Guide to ISO Data Products:
Data Quality Report

Last update: 27 July 2005

All standard observations in the routine phase were individually inspected and an assessment of the quality of the data products was made. It should be noted that the quality refers to whether the data are useful from the technical point of view; no attempt were made to judge whether the data serve the particular science goal.

A more detailed quality analysis is available since version 7.0 of the ISO Data Archive. Every standard observation in the archive has a new product called "Data Quality Report" which compiles the whole quality information available. Simultaneously a more extended and refined list of flags has been defined for a better characterization of the observations.

The "Data Quality Reports" include:

A list of flags which affect a given observation:

General:

Per instrument:

A list of flags is now available to characterize the observations taken with a given ISO instrument. More specific problems that can affect the observations like saturation, fringes, calibration problems, etc...are assessed. The whole list of available flags per instrument can be found below.

These flags may apply to the whole observation or only to certain part of it (certain measurement, wavelength, band or raster position). Note that not all observations affected by a particular flag have been identified so far.

Queries based on these flags are possible from the "Search Quality Flags" button of the ISO Data Archive.

Observations which were never executed or for which no data products could be derived are not displayed in the ISO Data Archive any more.

CAM Flags:

LWS Flags:

PHT Flags:

SWS Flags:

The second part of the Data Quality Report compiles the quality information associated to the Off-Line Processing Pipeline (OLPv10.1) which includes a list of caveats affecting a particular instrument, instrument mode and/or instrument configuration. Also, a list of quality flags per instrument related to pipeline processing and calibration scheme restrictions have been defined. They are:

General:

Per instrument:

CAM Flags:

LWS Flags:

PHT Flags:

SWS Flags:

Some of these pipeline processing problems/restrictions can be solved by means of an interactive analysis of the data. The resulting products are called Highly Processed Data Products (HPDP) and the full documentation of the reduction steps, improvement of the final products and their quality is also included in the Data Quality Reports.

Finally the Data Quality Reports include also general comments by experts.