"orig_flag" in "ts" via "ismn_data.read"

[pipipercy]

Hi, Here are my code to read data

ids = ismn_data.get_dataset_ids(variable='soil_moisture', 
                                max_depth=1)

ts, meta = ismn_data.read(ids[0], return_meta=True)
ts

after running it, i get

                     soil_moisture soil_moisture_flag soil_moisture_orig_flag
date_time                                                                    
2015-01-01 00:00:00         0.2608                D03                       M
2015-01-01 01:00:00         0.2607                D03                       M
2015-01-01 02:00:00         0.2606                D03                       M
2015-01-01 03:00:00         0.2605                D03                       M

I found the mean of soil_moisture_flag in here, but fail to find the mean of soil_moisture_orig_flag. what does the M denotes? Could you please help explain it for me?

[daberer]

Hi pipipercy.

the "M" (missing) in the orig_flag column means that the data provider did not supply own quality flags. You can ignore that. See here for a short description of the quality flags -> https://ismn.earth/en/data/ismn-quality-flags/. If you want to know a little more of the background of the quality flags you can check out https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/25/5749/2021/hess-25-5749-2021.pdf. Hope this helps!

PS: When you download data at the ISMN there is also a txt file included called ISMN_qualityflags_description.txt that gives a short description, and we have a github repo dedicated to the soil moisture quality flagging https://github.com/TUW-GEO/flagit.

[pipipercy]

Thanks for your detailed explanation! I learned a lot. :smile: