Quality control coding

[In progress]

Shear-probe quality-control flags

The Q (quality control) flags associated with shear-probe measurements are bitwise flags with boolean values which are CF compliant. More information available here: https://mplnet.gsfc.nasa.gov/about-flags

Every dissipation estimate from every probe must have Q flag. The numerical values of the Q flags are as follows:

Flag Mask	Bit	Flag Meaning	Example threshold value	Ex: True =1 / False =0	Ex: Q value
1	Bit 0	Poor figure of merit	1.15	0	0
2	Bit 1	Large fraction of data with spikes	5%	0	0
4	Bit 2	Anomalously large disagreement between dissipation estimates from probes	2.772	1	4
8	Bit 3	Too many iterations of despiking routine	8	0	0
16	Bit 4	Insufficient variance resolved	50%	1	16
32	Bit 5	manual flag to be defined by user	N/A	0	0
64	Bit 6	manual flag to be defined by user	N/A	0	0
128	Bit 7	manual flag to be defined by user	N/A	0	0
					Final Q = 20

The Q flags are combined by their addition. For example a Q value of 20 means that the dissipation estimated failed both dissipation ratio limit test and the resolved variance test. A value of 255 means that all tests failed. The reasons for a failure can be decoded by breaking the value of Q down to its powers of 2.

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