Kopte, Robert; Riehl, Torben (2025): Shipboard ADCP current measurements (38 kHz) during RV METEOR cruise M205 [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.980767

Current velocities of the upper water column along the cruise track of R/V Meteor cruise M205 were collected by a vessel-mounted 38 kHz RDI Ocean Surveyor ADCP. The expedition M205 was made possible through funding for the RUBBLE project from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. GPF 21-1_060. The ADCP transducer was located at 5.0 m below the water line. The instrument was operated in narrowband mode (WM10) with a bin size of 16.00 m, a blanking distance of 8.00 m, and a total of 80 bins, covering the depth range between 29.0 m and 1293.0 m. Attitude data from the ship's motion reference unit were used by the data acquisition software VmDAS internally to convert ADCP beam velocities to geographic coordinates. The Python toolbox OSADCP (version 2.0.2) was used for data post-processing. Acoustic Interferences were identified based on outliers in the ADCP echo intensity data. Echo intensity data were cleaned accordingly and affected velocity cells were flagged to be removed prior ensemble-averaging. The ship's velocity was calculated from position fixes obtained by the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), taking into account lever arms of ADCP transducer and GNSS antenna. Accuracy of the derived water velocities mainly depends on the quality of the position fixes and the ship's heading data. Further errors stem from a misalignment of the transducer with the ship's centerline. Data processing included water track calibration of the misalignment angle (0.1606° +/- 0.3993°) and scale factor (1.0044 +/- 0.0076) of the measured velocities. The velocity data were averaged in time using an average interval of 60 s. Depth cells with ensemble-averaged percent-good values below 25% are marked as 'bad data'.