Why should a stations performance score be reduced when poor or missing observations were not caused by station staff?
First, NWS management realizes that missing, late, or poor quality observations are not always the observers fault. ALL upper-air stations, at one time or another, will get an “unfair” hit on their monthly score. It is random and this is helping keep the network scores as fair as possible. The final score will be an average over a full year and this will help smooth out low scores that may have occurred during the year. One of the goals of the station performance score program is keep workloads required to generate the scores to a minimum. Going through each sounding to determine who or what caused a missing/poor quality sounding and then adjusting the scores accordingly would be an overwhelming task (the NWS network disseminates over 5,500 soundings/month). Therefore, generation of the scores is automated as much as possible. Further improvements to the equation will be made as additional performance measures are automated.
