(provided by Dr. Charles Flagg)
The USCGC Healy is equipped with two Acoustic Doppler
Current Profilers (ADCPs), a broad band 150 kHz (BB150)
and an ocean surveyor 75 kHz (OS75). The OS75 was newly
installed during the recent dry-docking period early
this spring and enhancements were made to both systems
to maximize their capabilities. Roughly speaking, the
higher frequency BB150 unit is capable of finer vertical
resolution while the lower frequency OS75 unit is capable
of greater range. During the cruise the configurations
of both units were varied to test the capability of
different setups. When conditions were most favorable,
the BB150 had a range of 150 to 200m while the OS75
had a range of over 400m.
Both units returned good data when conditions permitted.
The biggest item affecting the quality of the data was
breaking ice. Under those conditions only occasional
pings returned data. In their sensitivity to the noise
and vibration associated with ice breaking, the ADCPs
were no different than the other acoustic devices on
the ship. Since the ship spent most of the cruise in
heavy ice conditions, he distribution of good data is
heavily biased to those periods when the ship was on
station with the result that while the temporal coverage
looks very good, the spatial coverage appears intermittent.
Data processing has not reached the stage where we are
able to determine to what extent we can extract reasonable
quality data from the ice breaking periods. Nor have
we been able to determine whether there are differences
in data quality that depend on the severity of ice breaking.
Another factor affecting the data coverage was the shallowness
of the Chukchi Sea. The draft of the ship plus the quiescent
interval before the ADCPs can start to acquire the data
from each ping means that the shallowest bins start
at about 20m, a significant fraction of the water depth
over the shelf (~40m). Special techniques are required
to extract useable data from the narrow region before
interference from the bottom limits the range. Maximizing
the data under both ice breaking and shallow water conditions
will be one of the major tasks during the post cruise
processing.
A preliminary data processing methodology was developed
during the cruise that enables a presentation of velocity
data that have been roughly calibrated and undergone
some quality checks. The results should be adequate
for determining the overall velocity structure during
the cruise. Further refinements will probably make only
fine adjustments to the velocities. Although the magnitude
of the adjustments is hard to anticipate, it should
be small. The biggest modification anticipated is to
the BB150 unit when we are able to determine the speed
of sound in the transducer well. However, the lack of
knowledge of the sound velocity in the well has been
roughly taken into account during bottom-track calibration
and since temperature is fairly constant in the fresh
water/antifreeze mixture in the transducer well, big
changes in the velocity data are not anticipated.
The ADCP velocity data distributed at the end of the
cruise have been averaged into half-hour by 10 meter
vertical bins from each instrument. These data are contained
in two large ASCII data files, HY0201_BB150_ADCP_Vel.dat
and HY0201_OS75_ADCP_Vel.dat, in which the velocity
profiles are listed, together with the date, time and
position, by time interval. Data bins where the velocity
data did not pass the preliminary editing process are
indicated by 99999. These data are also
presented in color contour plots of eastward and northward
current components in the files: HY0201_BB150_Vel.tif
and HY0201_OS75_Vel.tif, respectively.
In addition to these basic data products, velocity
contours are also presented for the West and East Hanna
Shoals sections. For these plots, the data were averaged
into 5 km radial segments from the beginning of each
section. The standard deviations of the eastward and
northward binned velocities are also presented in separate
plots for each ADCP.
The velocity contour plots for the transects are presented
in:
HY0201_BB150_WHS_UV.tif, HY0201_BB150_WHS_STD.tif, HY0201_BB150_EHS_UV.tif,
HY0201_BB150_EHS_STD.tif, HY0201_OS75_WHS_UV.tif, HY0201_OS75_WHS_STD.tif,
HY0201_OS75_EHS_UV.tif, HY0201_OS75_EHS_STD.tif.
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