Turbulence in the shallow nearshore environment during SANDYDUCK '97

Abstract

An array of five acoustic Doppler velocimeters (ADV), which produce high quality measurements of the three-dimensional velocity vector in a sample volume with a scale of one centimeter, was deployed from late August through late November of 1997 at a water depth of approximately 4.5 m off Duck, North Carolina. The sensors were deployed near the sea floor but above the centimeters-thick wave boundary layer, and the sampling scheme was designed to resolve turbulence statistics averaged over tens of minutes, much longer than typical wave periods but shorter than time scales associated with variablity of energetic wind-driven and wave-driven alongshore flows.