IOA-1 Acoustic Correlation Current Profiler (ACCP)

Abstract

IOA-1, a prototype acoustic correlation current profiler (ACCP), which operates at 75 kHz, has recently been built and tested. IOA-1 has 2 kinds of transducer geometry, one is named non-uniform array, and the other is named uniform array. IOA-1 was tested in East China Sea in July 1999. The sea trial data of IOA-1 were processed with the maximum likelihood estimate and nonlinear least squares estimate separately. The results of the authors' theoretical predictions and sea trial show that IOA-1 achieved its optimum performance when the maximum likelihood estimate and the non-uniform array were adopted jointly. Sea trial data of IOA-01 were also compared to velocity profiles and bottom track velocities obtained simultaneously during the sea trial from an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADP) and DGPS respectively. The comparison shows that IOA-1 obtained similar results with those from ADP and DGPS.