Quality assurance

Quality references in the Abstract and/or Lineage, although the ISO19115 Data quality elements within (MD_DataQuality) can also be used to document precision and accuracy more fully.

Quality assurance on raw data using the MATE plugin in QAX is mandatory.

QAX is an open-source project, jointly steered by AusSeabed, the United States of America National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Coast Survey (NOAA OCS), and the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (UNH CCOM). QAX version 1.0 is available on the AusSeabed GitHub (https://github.com/ausseabed/qax/releases ).

QAX facilitates quality assurance (QA) of multibeam echo sounder (MBES) data. It provides an efficient workflow for checking MBES data. The tool standardises QA outputs and assists the technician to perform a robust QA of data.

This assessment must be performed within data structure submitted to AusSeabed. This includes MBES, SVP, Navigation & Attitude or Trueheave data. The qajson file and screen capture of the summary from QAX (Figure 1) are required along with raw data on submission to AusSeabed.

Figure 1. An example of screen capture of the result summary from QAX.

At minimum, the Bathymetry Available and Backscatter Available checks need to pass even if any other checks fail or have warnings. We also expect to see the presence of other ancillary data in qajson file that QAX is able to detect such as true heave/navigation and svp files in the data level which is ready and readable for bathymetry processing.