I have a few ideas. Try to find out who installed the equipment and collected the data, who interpreted and edited data for final data set entry. What were their methods and quality control. Do you have just digital data, or examples of strip charts, punch tapes, site visits with comments, etc.? Who worked up data, how did they deal with missing records? What equipment were used, was it installed correctly for research, etc.? Are there documents such as a data library, publications, pictures? Can you visit sites of data collection, and look over any remnants as staff gauges, benchmarks of cross sections or bridge sites, historical aerial photos covering area, streamflow records used for stage discharge curves, adjustments with time. Location of rainfall sites relative to watershed measured and topography. I think you would find in discussing this topic with the US Geology Service professionals and research hydrologists or others involved with this work, a substantial amount of time is used in development of a quality data set. Someone should have documented the specifics, but realizing how sometimes this is not done or personnel changes and may cleanout and dump files or records, even reports, much can unfortunately be lost with time. Some research grade stations like USFS Coweeta Hydrologic Experiment Station or agencies like USGS take much effort in cataloging, filing, logging and storing past records, notes, etc. for posterity.

Also, plot the time series data out. Do the data of the various stations seem to correlate with each other. Are the readings frequent as many times per day, which is a good sign, or infrequent as daily readings, not as good quality. Do the flow hydrographs coincide with rainfall events? Temp changes with day and night, rainfall events, etc. Are there other streamflow data stations in vicinity which have good correlation with records taking into account some time differences in storms and response.

I have a few ideas. Try to find out who installed the equipment and collected the data, who interpreted and edited data for final data set entry. What were their methods and quality control. Do you have just digital data, or examples of strip charts, punch tapes, site visits with comments, etc.? Who worked up data, how did they deal with missing records? What equipment were used, was it installed correctly for research, etc.? Are there documents such as a data library, publications, pictures? Can you visit sites of data collection, and look over any remnants as staff gauges, benchmarks of cross sections or bridge sites, historical aerial photos covering area, streamflow records used for stage discharge curves, adjustments with time. Location of rainfall sites relative to watershed measured and topography. I think you would find in discussing this topic with the US Geology Service professionals and research hydrologists or others involved with this work, a substantial amount of time is used in development of a quality data set. Someone should have documented the specifics, but realizing how sometimes this is not done or personnel changes and may cleanout and dump files or records, even reports, much can unfortunately be lost with time. Some research grade stations like USFS Coweeta Hydrologic Experiment Station or agencies like USGS take much effort in cataloging, filing, logging and storing past records, notes, etc. for posterity.

Also, plot the time series data out. Do the data of the various stations seem to correlate with each other. Are the readings frequent as many times per day, which is a good sign, or infrequent as daily readings, not as good quality. Do the flow hydrographs coincide with rainfall events? Temp changes with day and night, rainfall events, etc. Are there other streamflow data stations in vicinity which have good correlation with records taking into account some time differences in storms and response.

I think by implementing any statistical analysis, it is nigh impossible to check the quality of the data. Dr. Hansen has given some wonderful suggestions above. In addition, I would like to ask you to check whether you can find any previous data (of at least a few of the parameters) of the same study area from any trusted source. In that case, you can tally both the datasets and develop an idea about the quality of the present data.

Dear Amirhossein ,

To check the quality of datasets, metadata is essential.

In the optics or these are data from field measurements, it is necessary to know the reliability of the operators, the equipment and the accuracy of the measurement system.

If you have the opportunity to find benchmarks to validate the reality of values by sampling, that's even better

I hope it could be an help.

For TBR rainfall records, quality control checks have been derived and used to good effect in recent years.

This is a UK example, but demonstrates the method:

Article Quality-control of an hourly rainfall dataset and climatolog...

Roberto Villalobos