Abstract: Quality control is an important technique approach of meteorological observation data quality management, and is prerequisite to assure credible observation data entering weather forecast and other operation systems. This paper reviews the progress of quality control technique in Euro-American developed countries and the development trends of similar technique in China. Inductive analysis reveals that: (1) the mature quality control techniques systematically and strictly consider the scienti fic of quali fied control algorithms, and the condition of erroneous judgment and omission in the whole algorithms or single check step. The impact assessment of erroneous judgment and omission ensures high credibility of the quality control process. (2)Due to the difference of property and error levels in different types of observation data, the description about the truth-value of atmosphere observation is remained in controversy. So, the mature quality control systems of meteorological observation data use the complex quality control, which take full advantage of observation data and from multiple observation systems. The crosschecking of observation is based upon the premise that atmospheric motion should obey the physical laws. (3) ECMWF, NCEP and other numerical weather predicont centers use variational quality control (VarQC) in data assimilation process. ECMWF updated VarQC in 2014, they use a Huber norm distribution to describe most innovation statistics after discarding systematically erroneous observations and deserve the credit for improved analyses and forecasts of extreme events. (4) The quality control operation in China has changed from the traditional not-real time quality control and manual review into the real-time quality control, evaluation and feedback. As quality control operational system matures, the emphasis of future technique development should focus on developing a quality control and evaluation operation platform for cross-checking of multiple-sources data, and should integrate applications of international advanced technology to realize ultimately the combination of statistically quality controls before data assimilation and variational quality control in the phase of assimilation.