> It would be great if we just had 4000+ weather station gnomes whose families are bound to tend a given station’s climate record for generations, who knew every detail of a station’s quirks, and who always write down all the station’s data including margin notes like "moved down the runway, built a shed nearby, and swapped out the sensor" - then hand carry their notebooks to NCEI each month. But instead, data ingest is an automated process, which means the handwritten margin notes sometimes get overlooked. So we need an automated process that flags problems and tells scientists, “hey, check out Barrow, there’s something odd there.”

Hand carrying notebooks and notes in the margin are a sign that your automated process is insufficient, not that manual processes would be better. Perhaps each weather station should have a physical button that people can push to insert a flag in the database that says to check the note in the margin?

(Also, it would be an ethical travesty to 'bind' generations of sentient beings to slavery like that. But fortunately that was a hypothetical.)