The paper by Vickers and Mahrt (1996) presents a series of automated tests designed to identify instrumentation problems, flux sampling issues, and physically plausible but unusual situations in time series data from towers and aircraft. These tests serve as a safety net for quality control, flagging records for further inspection and comparison with concurrent data. The critical values for these tests are empirically determined from real turbulent time series data. The tests include checking for inconsistencies between different tower levels, aircraft height fluctuations, and other potential issues. The paper also discusses the application of these tests to data from the Risø Air Sea Experiment (RASEX), Microfronts95, and the Boreal Ecosystem–Atmosphere Study (BOREAS). The authors emphasize the importance of visual inspection to verify or classify hard flags (instrumentation problems) as soft flags (physically plausible but unusual behavior). The study focuses on fast-response turbulence time series and does not rely on similarity theory or assume specific statistical distributions. The tests are applied to various datasets, and the results are discussed in detail, including the frequency of different types of flags and the criteria used to flag abnormal behavior and potential instrument problems.The paper by Vickers and Mahrt (1996) presents a series of automated tests designed to identify instrumentation problems, flux sampling issues, and physically plausible but unusual situations in time series data from towers and aircraft. These tests serve as a safety net for quality control, flagging records for further inspection and comparison with concurrent data. The critical values for these tests are empirically determined from real turbulent time series data. The tests include checking for inconsistencies between different tower levels, aircraft height fluctuations, and other potential issues. The paper also discusses the application of these tests to data from the Risø Air Sea Experiment (RASEX), Microfronts95, and the Boreal Ecosystem–Atmosphere Study (BOREAS). The authors emphasize the importance of visual inspection to verify or classify hard flags (instrumentation problems) as soft flags (physically plausible but unusual behavior). The study focuses on fast-response turbulence time series and does not rely on similarity theory or assume specific statistical distributions. The tests are applied to various datasets, and the results are discussed in detail, including the frequency of different types of flags and the criteria used to flag abnormal behavior and potential instrument problems.